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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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V 



OLD-TIME CHILD-LIFE. 



BY 

E. H. ARE, 

Author of "New England Bygones." 



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piiiladelpuia: 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

1881. 



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Copyright, 1880, by J. B. Lippincott & Co. 



TO 

ALL COUNTRY-BORN BOYS AND GIRLS 
AND TO THEIR MOTHERS, 

THIS LITTLE BOOK 

IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED. 



PEEFACE. 



These truthful sketches have Ijccn written 
with a desire to turn the attention of young 
people to the charms of quiet country life. 
They are offered to those older hoys and girls 
who, wliile still retaining a simple taste in 
reading, have ceased to he contented with 
verhal pap. 

So much impressed am I, however, with 
the dignity of oldtime rural life that I may, 
in treating of it, have sometimes talked over 
the heads of my desired audience. If, there- 
fore, these experiences are told in a style too 
formal for the taste and capacity of the age 
for which they are designed, it will he partly 
hecause of such frame of mind, and partly 
hecause I have flattered myself that mothers 
may like to read the little hook to their 
cliildrcn. 



G PREFACE. 



I trust it is not too simple to interest the 
mothers. If it is, I beg pardon for the harm- 
less delusion of thinking that the childhood 
of other countrj-born women could have been 
as easily made happy as my own. 



E. H. A. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. — East Koad and Whitefield Corner . 9 

II.— The Staqe-Coach 23 

III.— Dear Old Folks 32 

IV. — Wayside Things 44 

v.— West Koad 51 

VI.— Now AND Then 61 

VII. — Safford's Brook 70 

VIII.— Rock-Work 80 

IX. — Deacon Saunders 91 

X.— Fires 104 

XI. — Parson Meeker 115 

XII.— One Gala-Day 127 

XIII.— Bowdy-Place 130 

XIV. — Whitefield Academy .... 144 

XV. — Thanksgiving Dinners .... 152 

XVI.— Lathem's Wood 1G3 

XVII. — Queer Folks 175 



OLDTIME CHILDLIFE, 



CHAPTER I. 

EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. 

Two 'New England villages are dear to my 
heart, East Road and Whitefield Corner. Each 
consists of a double row of somewhat widely- 
separated houses stretching along a highway for 
half a mile or more. Each is perched on a high 
ridge of land running through the heart of its 
town, but Whitefield Corner has much the finer 
prospect of the two. Such villages often got 
their names by accident. A Mr. Moore built a 
mill a few miles from Whitefield Corner, and 
hence the little hamlet which sprang up around 
it was known as Moore's Mills. When a village 
clustered at the meeting of two roads, it was apt 
to be called a " Corner," — most likely that of 
the man who kept its first store. The simple 
fact that its houses were built alongside a main 
road. gave name to the village of East Road; 
2 9 



10 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

but Whitefield Corner was so called from its 
town. 

Nothing could be more restful to a traveller, 
on a summer's day, than to come into one of 
these tree-bordered streets, with its cool arch- 
way of overhanging branches. Both East Road 
and Whitefield Corner were much shaded by 
trees, mostly elms, whose lower limbs were left 
untrimmed and hung low. Here and there were 
clusters of slowly-dying poplars. Villagers 
seemed to hate to set axe into a tree. One 
in Whitefield Corner, a giant horse-chestnut, 
was cut down by a new comer because it 
shaded his garden. It had stood in the centre 
of the village, and was mourned ^as if it had 
been human. Another, the pride of the place, 
a huge elm, was lost in a curious way. A boy 
burned a wasps' nest from a fork of one of its 
branches. Shortly a coil of smoke came out 
from the tree. Its core of punkwood had 
caught fire, and its admirers were surprised 
to find that, for years, the splendid thing had 
been only a skeleton. Both trees were gi^eatly 
missed, for the village had nothing left to com- 
pare with these two kings, — the horse-chestnut 
in its pyramidal glory, and the elm with its 
wide spreading shade. 

There were two balm-of-gilead trees before 
a house at Whitefield Corner, which, though 



EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. H 

beautiful, with their double-faced leaves, were 
the wildest of rovers, sprouting up in gardens 
and cellars all over the village. They were a 
bother to their owner, matting his front-yard 
with rootlets and filling it with suckers ; yet 
this very fault of their intense vitality took 
hold of his heart, and he was loath to cut them 
down. 

The two lawyers of the village were wise 
men, whose practice took them up and down 
the steep hills of half their State. When, in 
winter, they ploughed with sleighs through 
snow-drifts to " shire-towns," they were as 
shaggy with wraps as the teamsters whom they 
met on the way. There were no harder work- 
ing men to be found anywhere than the best 
lawyers in oldtime New England towns. The 
court-room often located, for convenience, in 
some small village, was the scene of their sharp 
legal warfare. They drove from one " shire- 
town" to another, living much upon the road, 
some of them with their names after almost 
every case upon the " docket." As a race they 
were fine men to look at, — erect, robust, with 
a certain stateliness of manner. The faces of 
many of them, dead so long, are fresh to me, 
and they are like a gallery of grand old portraits. 

There was an ofiice in Whitefield Corner of 
one of these lawyers, — a dingy second-story 



12 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

room, full of tables and pigeon-holed desks, 
its walls lined to the ceiling with books. The 
floor, in front of its open fire, was actually 
worn thin by the feet of restless clients, and 
in one place you could look through a knot- 
hole into the unplastered store below. It was 
not a tidy office. I do not believe it was ever 
cleaned : cobwebs filled its corners, and thick 
dust lay upon its upper shelves. Its tables were 
always littered with papers, candlesticks, snuf- 
fers, inkstands, and old goose-quill pens. Its 
occupant was the slackest kind of a house- 
keeper, but he was an able lawyer. He was 
a college-graduate, an ardent lover of Greek, 
and, before he became absorbed in the law, a 
student of classic literature. With an open 
hand and generous heart, arrogant in his law- 
practice, but gentle-mannered in social life, he 
belonged to that old school of gentlemen 
which, before the days of far-reaching rail- 
roads, had no better representatives in New 
England than amongst the professional men 
of country-life. A vast deal of brain-work was 
done by this lawyer for thirty years in that 
dingy office. A rugged clientage, mostly of 
farmers, kept up a constant tramp over its 
stairs, — a good sample of the sturdy yeomanry 
of the State. They hoarded their money in 
greasy leather pocket-books or in stout bags, 



EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. 13 

from which they hated to spend it ; but when 
the lawyer had gained a case for one of them his 
client was always ready to pay him a fee, and 
men by whom his almost insolent assumption 
of legal learning was hard to be borne would 
''retain" him because they hated to "have him 
on the other side." Widows and orphans he 
was apt to serve without pay, and nothing 
pleased him better than to help a poor bright 
young man along, '^o monk in his cell was 
ever more dead to the outside world than this 
Whitefield lawyer when getting his cases ready 
fov court. Elbow-deep in bundles of papers, 
mousino: throuo:h old law-books, for^ettino: to 
eat, the dribble of store-barter came up to him 
unheeded through the hole in the floor, and 
he was alive only to his clients and his cases. 
In looking back to him as a citizen of a small 
village, I delight not so much in his legal abil- 
ity as I do in the coupling of his wise and 
broad views of life with a certain simplicity, 
which made him so dearly love nature that he 
took root in Whitefield. Hence cities had no 
charm for him. His last conscious act was the 
overlooking of a tree which he had set out, 
grown now into a wide-spreading chestnut, — 
fitting memorial of this large-brained lawyer, 
whose heart was as tender as that of a little 
child. 



14 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

A famous doctor lived at East Eoad. He 
was a handsome man, and was said to be the 
best suro:eon in all the State. He drove about 
the country in a low sulky, with a pair of 
saddle-bags under its seat, and was treated 
with as much deference as the parson himself. 
His speech was polished, and his smile was 
like a benediction. His only daughter, very 
beautiful, died in early womanhood, and left 
him more gentle-natured than before. He 
was as fine a country gentleman as I ever 
knew. 

Two beautiful elms stood before the front 
door of his house, which almost drooped their 
branches into your face. Under one of these 
the doctor's sulky always stood when he was 
at home ; so that he needed no other sign. 

Next to the doctor himself, the East Road 
children reverenced this sulky. They used to 
tiptoe up to it and peep at the saddle-bags, 
w^hich not one of them dared to touch. 
When he came out they all ran to the other 
side of the road, and curiously watched him 
until he drove off. If he nodded and smiled 
at them, which he always did unless he was in 
a great hurry, instead of nodding back, they 
huno^ their heads. I did not wonder at their 
awe of him. The beautiful ripeness of a se- 
rene old age seemed to be linked with the 



EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. 15 

vigor of youth in this splendid doctor of East 
Road. 

When his sulky stopped hefore a door the 
neighbors sent at once to see who was sick. 
He was reticent about his cases, but always 
gave a civil answer when questioned. Some 
women seemed to think he could work mir- 
acles ; but when he lost a patient they never 
blamed him. 

One of them, the wife of a farmer just out- 
side the village, rushed after him one day, 
shouting at the top of her voice, — 

"Is it true, doctor ? is it true ?" She had 
heard that he had put back the brains of a 
man, which had been spilled, and that the 
patient was quite well again. The old doctor 
silently beamed on her with his eloquent smile 
and drove on. The woman said, " It beat all 
nater;" but from that day she believed the 
story. 

The village children ate all sorts of wild 
things because, they said, if they were poi- 
soned the doctor could cure them ; and every 
one of them firmly believed that anything torn 
from the body could be spliced on by him. 
No one was more amused by this homage than 
himself. It was the natural reward of his 
skill ; so he took no pains to abate it. It made 
him a little proud, perhaps, but it left un- 



16 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

touched the sweetness of his heart. A tear 
or a tender utterance was as natural to him as 
a smile. When his speech was needed he pre- 
ferred it to silence, but he might be excused 
for the latter because he made it more elo- 
quent than many men's words. He was held 
up by mothers as an example to their sons, 
but no boy ever expected to grow up to be like 
the great doctor of East Eoad. When he died 
the whole town mourned him. It was as if a 
great prop had been taken away from every 
citizen. 

The practice of a country doctor was hard, 
taking him over rough roads, by day and by 
night, in all sorts of weather. He carried his 
medicines with him, in a small trunk or a pair 
of saddle-bags packed full of vials. To get 
a peep at these was a delight to children ; and 
I remember with what awe I used to watch 
the great East Eoad doctor when he tapped 
mysterious powders out of his vials upon bits 
of paper. I can see him now, mixing two 
kinds, gray and white, slowly grinding them 
together with the point of his penknife. He 
would drop paregoric and other liquids for the 
women whose hands trembled, and they used 
to bring their old medicine-bottles to him for 
inspection. He tried most of these, after 
shaking, by touching the ends of their corks 



EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. 17 

to his tongue, and was quite sure to condemn 
them by a shake of his head. The emptied 
bottles were washed and hung up by strings, 
to be used when wanted. Physicians in regu- 
har practice were called " calomel doctors" by 
the more ignorant farmers' Avives, who seemed 
to think that calomel or " marc'ry" was the 
basis of their practice. Such women had an 
affinity for quacks, and went about, with tlieir 
aprons full of herbs, treating cases for nothing. 
They liked to save the expense of a doctor, 
and seemed to think that any kind of medicine 
would do for a sick person. One at East 
Road gave to her husband, who was in sore 
straits, a dose of saltpetre when she should 
have given salts. The result was a funeral a 
few days after. A mother at Whitefield Cor- 
ner mistook laudanum for paregoric and made 
an angel out of a twin-baby. 

As a class the doctors were long lived, and, 
from much solitary driving, were apt to be 
thoughtful men. There was one in the next 
town to East Road whose cheeks were tanned 
like leather by exposure. He had a great deal 
of night-practice, for he was said to have ex- 
cellent judgment with children, and mothers 
had a way of waiting until after dark before 
they called the doctor. His horse knew every 
inch of the highway, and so he often slept as 



18 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

he drove. He was just the opposite of the 
great East Road doctor in this, — that when he 
got started at talking he never seemed to know 
how to stop. He laughed very loud at what 
he called " whims" in women, and once gave 
bread-pills to a person who was " spleeny." 
He was looked upon as a '' first-class doctor," 
but was a little '' peculiar," which was owing, 
he himself said, to the fact that his father and 
mother were cousins. 

Just outside of East Road ran a brook for 
some distance along the roadside, — a mild 
babbler in summer; tongue-tied in winter; 
but, when swollen by spring and autumn 
rains, it became a torrent, tearing wildly at 
its banks. On the farther side of this brook, 
close by a wood of pines, stood a small cot- 
tage, reached from the highway by a bridge. 
Strangely enough, in a bleak climate, it was 
plastered outside as well as in, and had been 
much peeled by frost. In it lived a woman 
by the name of Mary Jack, with two young 
daughters. She had been a "hired girl" of 
my grandmother's, so I one day went to visit 
her. 

She was a queer-looking woman, very dark, 
with black streaks under her eyes, and blacker, 
arching eyebrows, so that she seemed to have 
on spectacles. One of the little girls looked 



^^^T' ROAD AND WHITE FIELD CORNER. 19 

just like her, and the other was light com- 
plexionecl, with long yellow curls. She was 
quite pretty, and Mrs. Jack said she " favored 
her father." I had been told that Mr. Jack 
w^as humpbacked and had run away, and that 
Mrs. Jack was always expecting him. 

There was a nice little tea, with blackberries 
picked by the Jack girls from the roadside, 
and custards baked in cups. You could see 
the pine-trees through cracks in the wall ; but 
Mrs. Jack said she stuffed these cracks with 
rags in winter, when she moved into the south 
room, which was much warmer. From where 
I sat the bridge, with its slanting shadows un- 
derneath, the gliding brook, the unthrifty but 
beautiful wildness of its low-lying shores, were 
framed in the doorway like a picture. I 
asked Mrs. Jack why the bridge had been 
built so high up, and she said, " Bless you, 
child ! that ain't high up at all ; for when a 
freshet comes, if I didn't lift the planks, they'd 
all be carried off." 

" Lift the planks ?" 

"Why, yes. When the waters get 'most 
up to the bottom of the bridge, I begin at 
t'other side and take up one at a time until 
I've fetched 'em all in. The waters are de- 
ceitful. They're as swift as a mill-race in 
spring, and come 'most up to the door. Once, 



20 OLDTIME CHILD LIFE. 

in an awful wet season, they ran into the 
house.'' 

I waded under the hridge with the two 
little girls, and wandered about the woods 
and meadow-land with them. I remember 
how, as the day waned, the place began to 
seem weird to me, with its portable bridge 
and Mrs. Jack looking at me from her spec- 
tacled eyes. In the gloaming, from the 
brookside, came the croaking of frogs, and 
a whippoorwill set up a tooting in the heart 
of the wood. Mrs. Jack kept telling me to 
make myself at home ; but, somehow, I could 
not feel at home, and Avas very glad when I 
saw my grandfather's man coming for me over 
the brido-e. 

I wish I could show you that street of 
houses — East Road — -just as it was when I 
knew it, Avith its front-yards full of lilacs and 
rosebushes and clumps of lilies and peonies. 
I remember that a bunch of Aaron's-rod grew 
close by the doctor's doorstep, and that tansy 
used to push its blossoms, through his garden 
fence, into the front-yard. I wish you could 
see his doorway just as it looked when he 
was the great surgeon sought for from far 
and near. It opened into a square entry, 
with a mahogany table standing against its 
inner wall. On either side of this entry was 



EAST ROAD AND WHITEFIELD CORNER. 21 

a large room, with windows half darkened by 
vines, and wall seats under them deliciously 
cool and restful-looking. 

East Road used to be lively with the con- 
stant passing of wagons and teams. Now the 
sluggish life of the little village hardly indents 
its verdure, and the wide street is grass-grown 
between its ruts. There is a pathetic air of 
decay about it. I never knew a place which 
had, if one may so speak, such a human ex- 
pression. I suppose it is because I lived into 
it in childhood. The wise old doctor haunts 
it. So do they all wlio, known by me, dwelt 
in the square, roomy houses. 

Where the doctor used to sit in summer 
evenings, revered by the village children, is 
a weather-cracked door, shut close, its brass 
knocker looking as if unscoured for forty 
years. Several of the largest houses are no 
longer lived in. These dying homes touch 
me. I feel like crying out to them to stay 
where they arc, and to give back to me in 
reality what I give to them in memory. 

The peace and pathos and beauty of this 
shaded, half-deserted street suggest that heav- 
enly quiet for which we all long. You need 
not try to find the village on a map. Three 
brothers, who built three of its best houses, 
gave to it their own name. It is as often 



22 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

called B 's Corner as East Road; but I 

like the name of East Eoad better. A rail- 
road winds along its horizon with a flying 
mist-wreath of smoke. I trust this will never 
invade East Road, whose avenue of trees, 
stretching along a high ridge of land, may 
be seen from afar. 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE STAGE-COACH. 

Two stage-coaches ran through Whitefickl 
Corner from Dexter to East Road, one going 
up, while the other went down. The stage- 
coach was painted just the colors of a bumble- 
hee, in alternate yellow and black. It w^as 
lined with leather, grown slippery by use, and 
on both sides, close to its top, were printed in 
lar^e letters the names of the towns through 
which it passed : " Whitefield, Sanapee, Blake's 
Corner, &c."; '' &c." meaning all the towns 
between Blake's Corner and East Road. 

It was a lumbering vehicle, swaying upon 
broad springs and draw^n by six horses, with 
seats for nine persons inside and more on top. 
Its rumbling was heard from afar, and it was 
heralded by a cloud of dust. All the loafers 
used to swarm about the tavern-door to see its 
leaders come up with a dash. 

There were two taverns at Whitefield Cor- 
ner. One, with three great trees before it, had 
a comfortable, homelike look. The other was 

23 



24 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

bare, with only a lilac in front. The former 
was kept by a widow, the latter by a very fat 
man. Both set a good table, and the woman 
took one of the stages to dine and the man 
the other. Each tavern had a sign. One of 
these, with a stage and four horses painted on 
it, hung from one of the trees before the house 
kept by the woman. The other, quite plain, 
swung from a post painted green. The tavern 
with the trees was the most genteel. It had a 
cosey parlor, with a sofa and prints, and shells 
on its mantel, and its best chamber had fringe 
to its curtains, and a stove. It took the judges 
and lawyers at court-time, and was a quiet 
house for women and children. The other 
was a putting-up place for jDcddlers and team- 
sters. Each had a bar : the woman's was in 
a closet out of sight; the man's, filled with 
boxes and bottles, took up one corner of a 
room. Both taverns were remarkably clean. 

The peddlers were mostly sellers of tin, 
for which they were paid in rags and dried 
apples, and sometimes in old pewter and iron. 
Their carts, "fitted up" with hooks and shelves 
inside, the heavier wares being garnished with 
rattles and whistles, were the delight of young 
children, who crowded around the farmers' 
wives when they were what was called '' dick- 
ering" with a peddler. The pans of the latter 



THE STAGE-COACH. 25 

had very thin bottoms, and he was said to 
"cheat" at his weighing; hut the peddler al- 
ways declared that there were two sides to a 
stor}^, and that the women played tricks with 
their rags. It took a long time for the two 
parties to make a bargain, with much talk, 
which Farmer Lathem called "jabber." Mean- 
while, they made a quaint picture at a back 
door, — the peddler with steelyards weighing his 
rags and finding his mark with his finger, 
knowing that he was closely eyed by the 
women. The latter took great pride in new 
tin, and never failed to be amazed that so much 
brightness could be bought with old rags. 

The teamsters were apt to be " coarse- 
grained" and frequented taverns of their own, 
which were called " putting-up places," to dis- 
tinguish them from those of a higher class. 
Once the trafiic now given to railroads was 
carried on by teams, which kept the highways 
hard-trodden and lively. They were laden 
with all kinds of produce fit for commerce and 
barter, and their drivers, like those of the 
stages, were hardened to any stress of weather. 
A team was just tlie opposite of the stage- 
coach. There was nothing merry about it. 
It slowly ground its way along, creaking and 
groaning, unhastened by its driver's never- 
ceasing " G'lang!" Still, the team was peculiar 

3 



26 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

to the country, — an expression of its toilsome 
life, — and kept grass from growing in the high- 
ways. It gave motion — sluggish to be sure, but 
motion — from the moment it crawled over the 
edge of the horizon until some child who had 
been watching it cried out, " It's only a team." 

The stage-driver who put up at the woman's 
tavern, Moses by name, was better-natured 
than the other, but each was kind to his 
horses and had a face as red as a beet. With 
what a rush and dust they drove up to the 
tavern-doors and flung down their reins, tied 
up in a knot ! (These reins were never called 
" ribbons," for they were made of stout ox- 
hide.) Then they threw out the mail-bags 
and jumped from their boxes w^ith a bound. 
The hostler rushed out from the stable and the 
barkeeper back to his bottles. There was a 
rattling of dishes and a hurrying and scurry- 
ing both indoors and out ; the maid in the 
kitchen was sharp with her words and the 
landlady looked terribly w^orried, for the stage- 
folks were getting their dinners. 

While the old passengers w^ere eating new 
ones stole the " back seat," and more trunks 
were strapped on behind. All disputes about 
places were settled b}^ the driver, Avho gave the 
best to old ladies and such women as could 
never " ride backwards." 



THE S TA GE- CO A CIl. 



Moses was a regular old Trojan, driving 
through all sorts of weather. Sometimes his 
wheels were hub-deep in mud, sometimes as 
deep in water. He could find his way by night 
as well as by day, and it was fun for him to 
break through a snow-drift with his leaders. 
How old he was nobody knew. He might be 
all the way from forty to sixty. His driving 
would have been reckless in a city, but he 
knew every inch of his country route like 
a book, and where it was safe to " make time." 
He flew down hills at a furious rate, and 
cracked his whip and ploughed up the dust 
with a smother. His whip had a snapper in 
the shape of a tassel, which when he flung it 
out cracked like a pistol, reaching to the heads 
of his leaders. His stage and his harness were 
so strong, and his hand so firm and skilful, 
that an accident seldom happened. Sometimes 
a horse " baulked," but this only belated the 
tavern dinner. Once, when I was aboard, 
something in the stage " gave away" just five 
miles from Whitefield Corner. Then Moses 
put us all out by the roadside with our trunks 
and bandboxes and bundles, and he drove ofi:" 
to get the thing mended. I remeijiber how 
cruel he seemed when his mishap had made 
him deaf as a driver. For neither money nor 
coaxing would he take a single passenger with 



28 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

him, though one man had pressing business at 
Sanapee and a young girl expected to meet her 
lover at Blake's Corner. She walked on ahead 
and got there in season ; but the man foolishly 
waited for the stage, and lost, he said, " a good 
chance for a bargain." 

Moses chewed tobacco and spit to the wind- 
ward and swore in bad weather, but when 
everything ran smoothly he was the politest 
man in the world to ladies. 

The stage was a great place for gossip, and 
in it people had to be cautious as to what they 
said. I knew the village of Whiteiield Corner 
to be stirred up like a hornets' nest by the 
prattle of a little child to a mild-eyed inquis- 
itive stranger. The gist of her talk was that 
a certain woman was a liar ; and this liar was 
only an aunt to the stranger ! 

In bright da3'S the seats on top were in de- 
mand for men, but they were apt to make 
children giddy. The best seat of all was by 
the driver. Moses had been with many peo- 
ple, and was very observing. He had a sharp 
wit of his own, and a quaint way of telling 
stories. You would hear him call out in a 
cheery voice, " There is room for one more by 
me right here," and he sometimes found it 
handy to have a seat-mate to hold his reins. 

Village children used to watch for the stixge, 



THE STAGE-COACH. 29 



and were mucli excited when it stopped at 
their door. The one from the north was first 
seen like a speck where the white line of a 
road met the edge of the sky. The one from 
the south, hidden by trees, first made itself 
known by its rumbling. To ride in the stage 
was considered a luxury, but to be stage-sick 
was as bad as a sickness at sea. 

The vehicles in winter went upon runners, 
and were shut up close with curtains of woollen. 
Overturns in these were not uncommon, but 
seldom ainounted to more than a snow-plunge 
and a little bruising. Trunks were called 
baggage. Bandboxes were tossed upon the 
top; and, as these were mostly of paper, 
they had, in wet weather, to be covered 
with a piece of tarpaulin. Bottles and bundles 
were tucked beneath the seat of the driver, 
and hard things were put under his feet. 
His pockets were crammed, and there seemed 
to be no end to his personal carryings. He 
was as safe with a secret as the mail, and 
winked when he took and gave small packages. 
He grew a little careless with age, and lost some 
of his custom. Once he carried a bottle of 
leeches to Sanapee which ought to have been 
left at Whiteiield Corner. They were wanted 
for a man who afterwards died, — not, it is to 
be hoped, for lack of the leeches. Again, he 



30 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

misplaced a box of trout, which were not at 
all improved by keeping. He forgot a bonnet 
made for a bride, who vainly expected its 
coming. 

]S'o wonder that taverns were enticing at 
stage-time ; that loafers sat in rows on wooden 
benches before them ; that storekeepers stood 
in doorways and women came to window^s 
when Moses whirled up cracking his whip 
at his leaders. Even farmers stopped from 
work in their fields when boys called out, 
" The stage is coming I" The cobbler, whose 
shop, paved in front with scraps of leather, 
was next to the woman's tavern, always came 
to his door with a shoe in one hand and a 
last in the other. 

Yes, a rare man was Moses, undismayed 
by any kind of errand or weather. When 
other people were hugging their fires, he 
kept himself warm by beating his breast 
with his arms. What the women failed to 
find in the stores of Sanapee, Whitefield, and 
Blake's Corner, he got for them in the larger 
town of Dexter. He never was vexed by a 
bandbox or failed to find room for a trunk. 
He helped the mothers with their babies as if 
he had been a born nurse, and nothing could 
keep him from laughing but the stifiening of 
his muscles by frost. 



THE STAGE-COACH. 31 

They are all gone now, — the taverns, tlie 
loafers, and the cobhler. So, also, are the 
drivers, with their leaders. Grass grows 
where a cloud of dust once stretched out 
behind them. East Road, as I have told 
you, is quite deserted ; but at Whitefield and 
Blake's Corner the rumble of the steam-cars 
is far louder and longer than the oldtime 
rumble of the stages. 



CHAPTER III. 

DEAR OLD FOLKS. 

My grandmother died twenty years ago at 
East Road, having lived in this sinful world 
ninety-two years. From her appearance at that 
time, one might have supposed that she would 
live to be more than a hundred, so erect, so 
well preserved, so bright, was she, this aged 
woman, who had resolutely held her own al- 
most through her second half-centuiy. I see 
exactly how she looked, the very garments she 
w^ore, the ways peculiar to herself, her whole 
aspect radiant with an immortal youth. She 
may not have been a very learned woman, — I 
dare say she was not ; but in sweetness of speech 
and in personal magnetism ni}^ childhood never 
saw her equal. At fifty, I have been told, she 
was the handsomest woman in her town ; at 
sixty the hand of time had but lightly caressed 
her; and at eighty she seemed in the full splen- 
dor of a ripe old age. When she came to die 
it was like the sudden going out of a spent 
candle. She slept through the last night of her 

32 



DEAR OLD FOLKS. 33 

long and useful life as peacefully as a little 
child, and waked in another world. 

It is to the credit of the old men and women 
whom I kncAV in childhood that they taught 
me a reverence for age. They came from a 
stock out of which the feeble ones had per- 
haps been wdnnowed by a harsh climate and 
hard work, so that they were the best of their 
race. They were strong and wase to the last. 
They were charming companions for little 
children, because they loved to tell of the 
incidents of their simple lives. Some of them, 
like my grandmother, were born story-tellers, 
and twined imagery in and out their speech, 
making pleasant objects of the commonest 
things. There could be no sweeter picture 
than that of the dear old creatures sitting by 
open fires with little children listening, wide- 
mouthed, to their riddles and innocent prattle 
of their own young days. 

My brother Benny and I believed our 
grandmother to be the brightest of women, 
and thought her oft-repeated stories wonder- 
ful, though they seem simple enough now. 
There must have been a vein of poetry in the 
old story-teller herself which made them mar- 
vellous to us. One, about the making of a 
johnny-cake, comes back to me, almost word 
for w^ord, with the fidelity of a nursery-rhyme. 



34 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

This is how she told it : " Wlien I was a little 
girl, seven tj-odd years ago, I thought I would 
bake a johnny-cake of my own. You know 
how it is done, children. You must scald your 
bright yellow meal with hot water and beat 
your batter well with a spoon ; add a little salt, 
and then spread it very smooth and thin upon 
your tin. Tilt the tin before the open fire, and 
when your cake has slightly browned upon one 
side turn the other side to the fire, that both 
may be firm and crisp. Now, children," she 
always said, " if you have made and baked that 
cake right, all the golden glory of the corn 
will be between those two crusts, and it will 
go out to meet the butter, and the butter will 
embrace it, and both will melt in your mouth, 
sweet, healthful, delicious." Here, after a little 
pause, she would take up her story again : " To 
begin where I left off* : I thought I would bake 
a cake of my own : so I mixed my batter and 
took it slyly behind the shed, where it might 
bake unseen. An open fire was of no use out 
of doors, and it had taken me one whole day 
to get an oven ready. Six well-shaped flat 
stones were not easily found, — four for the sides 
and top, one for the bottom, and another for 
the door. A narrow gap, made by slipping 
back the top stone, gave a draft, and the thing 
was done. Then came the gathering of fuel 



DEAR OH) FOLKS. 35 

and the sly kindling of the fire ; for there were 
no matches in tliosc days, and a coal was to be 
filched from the kitchen fireplace." 

Her horror at seeing smoke curling above 
the shed and her being found out were vividly 
told. I^evertheless she was left to heat her 
oven, and she put in her cake and waited for 
it to bake. At this point she always wondered 
that her calico tier had not caught fire, and 
that, instead of being our loving old grand- 
mother, she had not been burnt to a cinder. 
The tale o-rew livelier as the cake went on 
bakins;. She looked into the oven several 
times. It was "doing beautifully;" it was 
'' almost done." Then her mother called to 
her, — 

"Eleanor, go up to E'eighbor Merrill's as 
quick as you can, and borrow a piece of ren- 
net." She hated to go and leave the cake, 
but go she must ; and " it did seem," she al- 
ways said, " as if Mrs. Merrill would never let 
me ofi*. 

" When I got home I went straight to my 
oven, and what do you suppose ? Well, if you 
will believe it, a hog had come along and was 
eating my cake as fast as he could !" 

Here Benny always said " Oh !" and I said 
" Oh !" and we were both very sorry that a hog 
had eaten up our grandmother's golden glory. 



36 OLDTIME CHILD LIFE. 

We could never quite understand how the 
hog could root down the rocks if they were 
hot. We always wanted to ask our grand- 
mother if he waited for them to cool, but 
were a little in awe of her : she looked so se- 
rene and so far off, with her beautiful, age- 
crowned head, and her composure, elegant and 
rare. 

My dear, it was not much of a story. The 
golden glory was not in the cake. It was in 
the lovely old grandmother herself. Out of 
her roj^al nature and presence zest went into 
it, and was given to the little ones who heard it. 

A tone of her voice, a turn of her head, a 
touch of her dear old hand gave force to it. 
It was a part of herself, and as such we always 
hailed it with delight. Not long since I turned 
aside, upon a journey, to visit the spot where, 
a hundred years before, she had built the oven 
for her golden glory. 

She brought me a fine present once in 
a great, round willow basket, and wrapped 
about with a fine linen table-cloth of her own 
weaving. It came eighteen miles in midwin- 
ter, with my grandfather and grandmother, 
who carefully packed it in straw, lest it should 
be nipped by frost or marred by jolting. I 
see them now as they looked when they drove 
up to my father's door, their old heads just 



DEAR OLD FOLKS. 37 

above the high hack of their hrown sleigh. 
My grandfatlier wore " fringed" mittens, and 
my grandmother a " pumpkin" hood and a 
thick green veil. A shaggy huffalo-rohe was 
tucked about them both, and inside of this 
was a homespun coverlet of blue and wdiite. 
Bells were strung by a leathern strap about 
the horse's neck, and their far-reaching jingle 
was heard long before the sleigh came in sight. 
We children could tell the sound of them from 
that of any others. The horse was a little less 
shaggy than the robe, and his harness, made 
for farm use, had blinders almost as large as 
tea-plates. When he stopped he gave a sturdy 
shake of his bells, and then hung his head in 
that attitude of patient waiting peculiar to 
farm-horses. 

The old folks got out a little clumsily, tug- 
ging the willow basket between them. They 
tottered under its weight, and had to set it 
down, even before Betsey, the maid, met them. 
Shall I tell 3'ou what it was, — this wonderful 
present, too heavy for the two octogenarians and 
as much as a strong, lithe lass could well carry? 
But first let Melissa stop her ears, — Melissa, 
that girl who gets all her dresses from Paris, 
with parasols and bonnets to match. It is not 
for the like of her to hear what these dear old 
folks brought to their grandchild in a willow 



38 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

basket more than forty years ago. All the 
boys and girls who have trundled hoops along 
a country highway, who have scooped up its 
hot sand in summer days, half-wild foragers 
of a wild landscape, — such may lend me an 
ear and I will tell them. 

It was a cheese, — a great, fat, round cheese, 
into which had gone the cream of sixteen cows 
(my grandmother told me) ; and when it was 
cut Betsey declared that it was the " toothsom- 
est cheese" she had ever tasted. 

" I was not sure," the dear old lady said, 
" whether it were better to spot it with tansy 
or yarrow ; but your grandfather thought tansy 
w^ould make the prettier color." 

I was glad she took tansy, for that grew in 
a corner of the sunny garden, close by a strag- 
gling red-rose bush, under which hens bur- 
rowed, while the yarrow was found mostl}^ by 
the wall of the little burying-ground in the 
" east field." It would have been like tasting 
of the dust of one's ancestors to have eaten of 
yarrow. As it was, it seemed almost like de- 
vouring a part of the dear old grandmother 
herself to partake of the cheese at all. Her 
hand had plucked the pungent tansy and ex- 
pressed its tinted juice. It was her skill that 
had coaxed the tender curd from the whey 
and moulded and pressed it until it compacted 



DEAR OLD FOLKS. 39 

into my well-rounded present. It was the 
quaint old pair who had taken it, when 
drained, from its press and tugged it into the 
safe, where for days they had carefully turned 
it, and Avatched its bulging sides for mischiev- 
ous cracks, while oiling and polishing its rind. 
There was somethins^ touchino^ in this takinfi: 
up again by these old people of a bygone task 
out of love to a little child. 

I remember their old cheese-safe. It had 
a perfume of its own, as if wild scents had 
been poured into it from field and pasture. 
The room in which the cheeses were made 
opened from the kitchen and had a fireplace, 
with oven and boiler for rough work. Its outer 
door was high up, without steps, and from it 
waste waters were fluno^ into a slack-lookins: 
rock-heap. Close by was a corn-house on 
stilts, and a cider-press under a shed. Between 
this shed and the house a flock of turkeys and 
a gobbler kept up a constant march, and the 
corn-house was alive underneath with hens. 

At harvest-time the yard about the press 
was always heaped with apples, set apart for 
the making of cider. I see the old farm-horse, 
hitched to a long beam, walking his patient 
round ; rich juice trickling into a trough, and 
the mash turning brown in the sun. Outside 
the slied is a row of iron-hooped casks. A 



40 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

week later these will all be foaming at their 
bung-holes, through which, if jou put your ear 
close, you will hear a deep -toned, singing 
sound, — the cider is working. ^N'ow is the time 
to suck it with a straw, pulled from the upper 
mow of the barn. It will gush upon your 
tongue with a mellow, spicy tang, — this per- 
fumed, yeasty life-blood of the apple. If you 
choose to draw it, with loss, from the spigot, 
and hold it, in a tumbler, up to the sun, j^ou 
will see it full of tiny bubbles, which fly after 
each other with a hum. Later the bungs will 
be driven in, with a fringe of husks around 
them, and the casks will be planted in a row 
against the cellar-wall. In midwinter, when 
the humming inside of them has stopped, they 
will give out a silent, thin, sour drink. This 
is called '• hard cider." 

Close behind the cider - press were two 
roomy old barns. These had for a background 
a wooded mountain, up to the base of which 
stretched my grandfather's broad acres of 
field and woodland and pasture. ISText to the 
mountain was a meadow, always wet and full of 
pitfalls. The men-folks said that it was boggy, 
and had no sound bottom. One spot in par- 
ticular they let entirely alone. This held a 
large puddle of half-stagnant water, which 
never dried up, even in the longest drouth. 



DEAR OLD FOLKS. 41 



Cows gave this puddle a wide berth, and the 
bhick circle of their hoof-marks was far from 
its outermost edge. 

When the cheese had been cut and tasted, 
and greatly praised, my grandmother telling 
again that into it had gone the cream of six- 
teen cows, she remarked, '' One of the cows 
will never help make another cheese. She got 
mired last fall." 

" Got mired !" Benny looked at me and I 
looked at Benny. Here was a mystery. "Oh, 
tell us all about it !" we both cried; and the dear 
old woman sat down, and we sat down in front 
of her and folded our hands, and she began : 

'' One night, late last fall, the cows came up 
as usual to the pasture-bars, lowing to be let 
out. The hired man counted them as they 
jumped over the lower bar. There were only 
fifteen of them. One was missing,— Brindle, 
the youngest and best of the lot. It was her 
cream that gave your cheese its soft, golden 
tint. The hired man hunted over the pasture 
in vain. Then he crossed into the woodland, 
calling ^Mooly! Mooly!' as he went. He 
thought the creature might have broken into 
the highway; but there was no gap in the 
fence, and she certainly was not in the pound. 
Just as he was giving up in despair, out from 
the meadow came a faint sound, almost like a 

4 



42 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

human wail. He went towards it as far as he 
dared, up to the very edge of the bog, where, 
close to the stagnant water, what should he 
see but Brindle, neck-deep in mud !" 

Here our grandmother stopped. There was 
a little flutter of the lace about her throat. 
We thought there was a tear in her eye ; but 
she brushed her hand ever so lightly across 
her face, and it was gone. 

Little Benny, who had the tenderest heart 
of any mortal, tried to ask, "Did she get 
out?" but he could only utter a w^ord, and I' 
had to finish his question for him. 

"ISTo," said my grandmother; "the man 
stayed and watched her until nothing was 
left but her horns, and in the morning they 
too had gone out of sight. She could not 
have been gotten out, for the bog was quite as 
unsafe for man as beast. The wonder was 
how she came to go there at all, so fully had 
the spot always been shunned by herds. She 
might have been driven in by a prowling dog. 
Even "Watch, who had grown gray in our 
service, was not above suspicion." 

A trifle formal was my grandmother in her 
story-telling; but her style became her, — this 
dear old woman, \\\\o loved everything that 
belonged to her farm. 

When her story was done, Benny and I 



DEAR OLD FOLKS. 43 

pitied her, because she had lost the golden 
tinge to her cheeses when Brindle got mired 
in the hole without a bottom. 

Meanwhile the delightful pair, the grand- 
father and grandmother, sat by the open fire 
that night, she in her stiff black silk, with 
her face framed in a frill of lace ; he patri- 
archal of aspect; both cast in radiant high 
light upon a shadowy background of the 
dim old room. 

Tlie}^ went home the next day, leaving 
the basket and cheese behind them. The 
cheese melted quickly away. The basket, 
much worn at its handles and brittle to 
touch, is still in being. Poor old thing ! It 
is more than forty years old. JMo matter; so 
long as it lasts at all, it can never be so old, 
or so broken, that it will not at sight of it 
call up tlie picture of two dear old creatures 
tugging a great cheese, made from the cream 
of sixteen cows, as a present to a little child. 



CHAPTEE IV. 



WAYSIDE THINGS. 



The pound, in which my grandfather's 
" hired man" vainly sought for the lost cow, 
was half a mile from East Road. 

A pound was apt to be a scary place, 
generally quite far from any house. There 
is one now in most, if not all, !N"ew England 
towns. In it animals found trespassing are 
shut up ; also such as have strayed away 
from their owners, or are dangerously loose 
upon the highway. Here they are kept 
and tended until claimed, and their damages 
paid. It was a reproach to a farmer to have 
an animal put in the pound, and the im- 
pounding of one was often the occasion of 
much ill-feeling. 

There was a pound half a mile outside of 
the village where I was born. Its walls were 
thick and high, and topped by huge beams, 
mortised at their ends. Its gate was like the 
door of a prison for strength, and was fast- 
ened by a huge padlock. Many a time have 

44 



WAYSfDE THINGS. 45 

I seen cows and horses in it browsing its 
meagre grass, and looking hopelessly through 
the bars of its gate. 

Later this pound fell into disuse. Its beams 
rotted and tumbled from their sockets over 
the wall. The gate got unhinged. Some- 
body stole the padlock. Blackberry and su- 
mach bushes filled the place ; and nothing but 
ghosts were supposed to dwell in it. 

Children seemed to think something dread- 
ful was always lurking in this pound. It was 
a favorite haunt of snakes; and a drunken 
man, who lived just outside of the village, 
used to get sober behind its walls. Once a 
little dog, cut by a scythe, crawled in amongst 
its bushes and cried one whole day. Just be- 
cause he was in the pound, the children said 
he was mad; and he would have starved to 
death had it not been for a traveller. A crazy 
w^oman slept in it one night, and when she left 
it had one more reproach than before. It was 
as if an ogre had cast a spell over the spot. 

Yet, after all, the ghostly old pound entered 
pleasantly into the lives of the children. It 
was a way-mark for them. They measured the 
distance of fields and woods and pastures from 
it. They seldom went into it; yet, when it 
was gone, they greatly missed it. As years 
went by, with no use for it, the town let it 



46 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

alone. Farmers filched its rocks, one by one, 
to splice into their own walls ; and, before any- 
body seemed to know that it was going, the 
old pound was wiped from the landscape. 

Just beyond this pound was a guideboard. 
Guideboards used to stand at almost every 
meeting of roads in l^ew England. They are 
less frequent since railroads came into use, 
but still thrust out their friendly arms on all 
chief highways of travel. Once they were 
never left to get out of repair. ]^ow you find 
them at the angles of by-roads, split and 
one-sided, or lying flat by the w^ay. 

I remember with what interest I used, when 
travelling, to study their inscriptions. Each 
board had a black hand, with a long, black 
finger, pointing towards the towns named. 
They were friendly things, with a half-human 
look. At dusk, in the sandy, sparsely-wooded 
huckleberry plains which lay between "White- 
field Corner and East Road, guideboards 
loomed up to travellers like gaunt creatures. 
One, at the meeting of four roads in these 
woods, had four arms full of script, for these 
highways were so alike that only stage-drivers 
and frequent passers could tell whither each 
went. Strangers had to walk around this 
guideboard to read all of its inscriptions. It 
was only a few miles from East Road, and it 



WAYS WE THINGS. 47 



was refreshing, upon a sudden turn in a weary 
journey, to be told so. 

The one above the pound at Whitelield has 
for many years ceased to be ; but I behokl it, 
as if it were but yesterday, with its post 
painted red, its two white boards set at right 
angles, bound with black, and lettered in bold 
script, — 



Sanapee 10 miles. 
Boxford 2 " 



This guidcboard had such a bad reputation 
that when a man living near it was supposed 
to be untruthful, it was often said that he 
"lied like the guidcboard to Sanapee," and 
women in its neighborhood laughed when 
they saw strangers stopping to read it. In 
just such simple ways as these are the lives 
of country people linked with the objects 
about them. 

''Boxford 2 miles." You had to go to 
Boxford to get to Red Mountain. Red 
Mountain is not down on the map, but it is 
set into a landscape like a jewel in a queen's 
crown. To reach it you had to drive through 
the little village of Boxford; then several 
miles along a rugged road to a pair of bars, 
which let you into a field. At the far end of 
this field, up the side of the mountain, was a 



48 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

house with a barn, where a farmer's wife told 
you that you might ^'put up" your horse; 
and then some such dialogue as this took 
place : 

" Hast thee come far?" 

"From Whitefield Corner." 

" Thee must be tired. Would thee like to 
go into the dairy and get a glass of milk ?" 

" I'm sorry to trouble you." 

" It's no trouble at all." 

As straight as an arrow was this aged 
Quakeress, and her attire was without crease 
or stain. It was very simple, — a muslin cap, 
a white kerchief, crossed upon her breast, and 
a plain gown, quite covered by a long, broad 
apron of homespun check. 

She was proud of her dairy, which was 
faced with stone, and cut in two by a stream 
of coolest spring water. Over this she kept 
her milk in rows of shining pans. The 
stream was walled in like a mill-race, and 
glided under the pans with a swift and noise- 
less motion. 

Everything about the house and farm had a 
quaint flavor. There were two daughters, 
grown up into prim Quakeresses, wearing 
aprons and kerchiefs like their mother. Ad- 
oniram, the son, was a silent young man, 
talking mostl}' by signs. The Boxford girk 



WAYSIDE THINGS. 49 

said he was " as grum as one of his grand- 
father's bears." 

This grandfather came to the mountain 
when it was dense with a forest. On it he 
killed two hears, with their cubs ; and, until 
he could do better, lived in their den. Hence 
he was called Bear Manson ever after. 

lie cleared a farm, built a log house, and 
married a wife from Boxford. ]^ext he raised 
the framework of this home of which I am 
'telling you; and, by degrees, finished and 
furnished it. Its timbers and boards were 
sawed at a mill just outside of Boxford. 
The men of that village went up to the 
raising, and the mountain echoed with the 
sound of their axes and hammers. Bear 
Manson gave them a good supper; and one 
of them got so mellow with cider that he 
lost his way, and wandered all night on the 
mountain. 

Adoniram liked to show the bears' den, 
where one saw the smoke-stains of the old 
man's fires, and wondered how he could live 
in it at all. Just by the den began the path 
to the crown of the mountain. It was well 
beaten, and, for half the way up, shaded by 
trees. I am told that it is there still. 

On the top of Eed Mountain is one of the 
rarest of views. Many visitors lunch there, 



50 OLD TIME CHI LB LIFE. 

and they are always sorry to come down. ^ It 
is an enticing place, and tliey are loath to leave 
the house on the green slope, with its dairy, 
its gliding stream, its bears' den, and the story 
of the sturdy old man who lived in it. 

The Boxford and Whitefield Corner people 
to this day declare that old Bear Manson was 
" close" ; that he cheated in the measure of 
his wood, and swelled his corn over his spring 
before he sold it, and put tallow in his bees- 
wax, and w^as the " trickiest of all old men." 

Listen only to the mountain, wdiich tells 3'ou 
that old Bear Manson was a brave soldier, 
who fouo^ht ao-ainst beasts and trees and 
rocks, and conquered a home, — this home, 
seen from Whitefield and Sanapee and Box- 
ford, on its sloping background of green. 

Here he drank the purest of water, and 
breathed the sweetest of air. He lived long ; 
and the work and story of his life make 
pleasanter every child's trip to Ked Moun- 
tain. 



CHAPTER y. 



WEST ROAD. 



When the early snows of winter had hard- 
ened into good sleighing my grandfather and 
grandmother used to make ready for their 
yearly visiting. My grandmother began by 
doing up her laces, — her favorite diversion. 
Then she plaited them into caps and frills, as 
tasteful and becoming as if made by any mil- 
liner. 

Just imagine this dear old lady, who was 
born one hundred and twelve years ago, toss- 
ing laces into coquettish shapes to please the 
eyes of men and women of a bygone age. 
Does it not seem almost like a fairy tale, this 
snatching from the clutches of the past such 
filmy things as seem to be only the portion 
of to-day ? 

I have a double cape of real thread, yellow 
and rare, which used to be " clear-starched" 
by this proud old lady. It was a dainty pro- 
cess. She stroked and caressed the capes as if 
they had been living things, and held them up 

61 



52 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

to the sun that she might show off their deli- 
cate tracery. 

" These will be yours some day," she would 
say. '' They are to be worn together, and are of 
very fine lace. You must always have one point 
in the back, one upon either shoulder, and pin 
the others down in front. You will be likely 
to tell, w^hen people admire them, that they 
once belonged to your grandmother." 

Dear, deluded old dreamer ! She might as 
well have sent her name down upon a cobweb. 
Here they are, the double capes, wdth four 
jagged rents in them, each equidistant from 
that point in the back. Without the rents, I 
have been told, they would be w^ortli many 
times their weight in gold. I am sure they are 
worth that to me to-day, because of the fingers 
that marred them, and because of the woman 
that wore them. 

" Who tore the capes ?" IS^ot the child who 
saw them " clear-starched" by the open fire, 
but another, later born, to whom they were to 
fall by inheritance. She had never been taught 
to reverence them. ]^o old lady had " clear- 
starched" them for her, and held them up to 
the sun, and stretched out their intricate pat- 
tern and put life into them. To her they were 
only old-fashioned, yellow crumpled things, 
found in the corner of a chest of drawers, 



WEST ROAD. 53 



where she had no business to he rummaging. 
The ghost of no ohl grandmother came to tell 
her of their value. 

Besides she had a doll, — a doll stuffed with 
sawdust, Avliich had never worn lace at all, 
and for which the yellow capes were quite good 
enough. So she drew them up in the neck 
with a string and tried them on. Singularly 
enough, she placed them just as my grand- 
mother had said, " with one point behind, one 
down either shoulder, and the others in front." 
To keep them straight she had to thrust the 
wooden arms of the doll through the side- 
points, and then her robe was finished. You 
think the capes are spoiled, do you? I do not, 
for the child who made the holes is dead. Did 
you ever know any kind of a garment to be 
valued less because it had been used and 
marred b}- a child who was dead ? 

" "We are going to West Road to-day, and 
you must be a good child while we are gone," 
said my grandmother to me one w^inter's morn- 
ing, so long ago that I hold my breath when I 
think of it. 

" You must be a good child while we are 
gone." Why did she not say. And you may 
go with us ? I asked myself the question 
many times that day, for it was one of the 
sharpest griefs of my childhood, the driving 



54 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

away from the farm-house of the two old folks, 
leaving me, their child-visitor, behind. 

All the morning they had been busy as bees 
with their "fixing off," although it was only 
five miles to West Road. How splendid they 
both looked to me, — my grandmother in black 
silk, my grandfather in a blue coat spangled 
with gilt buttons ! I watched the packing of 
the pointed collars and a gay cap into a basket, 
— a quaint basket, with covers like two flaps, 
and handle wound with green baize. 

They kissed me when they started, and 
charged me again to be a good child. I saw 
them drive slowly from the yard and up 
Merrill's Hill until they seemed poised upon 
the edge of the horizon, down which they 
dropped out of sight, on their way to West 
Road. 

When the sound of their bells had died 
out I turned into the lonely house with my 
heart almost ready to break. Then and there, 
with a vehemence which would have surprised 
my ancestors had they beheld it, I said, " I will 
see West Road before I die." 

The old folks came back in the early even- 
ing, their bells telling of them long before 
they drove over the crest of Merrill's Hill. 
Hannah, the maid, said to them that I had 
"sulked" all day; but they were glad to see 



WEST ROAD. 55 



me, and by their gradual speech melted my 
mood. They had brought with them a glamour 
from the mysterious West Road. 

They went over the day's experience to- 
gether, with a half-childish prattle. My grand- 
mother praised the fineness of the table-linen 
of her hostess, woven in a new pattern ; the 
richness of her preserves ; and gave to Han- 
nah a receipt for pickles which she had brought 
home. My grandfather talked of a yoke ot 
oxen of large girth, and declared that he 
was afraid their host would stuff his horse to 
death with oats. They were both of them 
refreshed and pleased by their visit. 

I did not forget West Road. All through 
my childhood, whenever I saw a highway dip- 
ping over the low-lying horizon into space I 
thought of that village, and mentally renewed 
my purpose to see it before I died. 

By degrees the place took shape in my mind. 
At first it was only a sunshiny spot, where aged 
men and women, in holiday attire, sat and 
talked about the things which most concerned 
their simple lives. Later I built up around 
them half a dozen square-roofed houses, stand- 
ing at the crossing of two roads. I put a 
blacksmith-shop near by, and a store, with a 
lawyer's sign on the second story. Just by 
one of the houses was a doctor's ofiice, and on 



56 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

a near hill a meeting-house with a long horse- 
shed, hut without helfry or chimne3^ 

This village slowl}^ arose from the gossip of 
two old tongues. My grandfather's horse had 
cast a shoe on his way to West Rpad, which 
a blacksmith, Amos by name, had reset. My 
grandmother had brought me back some 
sugar hearts, red and white, bought, she said, 
at West Road. They had visited at the 
" 'Squire's," where the minister and the 
lawyer, with their wives, drank tea with them. 

When my village was built, I never added 
to it nor took away from it, and when at last 
I saw it, it stood, as I had pictured it, at the 
meeting of the roads. It was reached by a 
little turning aside from the ordinary routes of 
travel and some hours spent in going up and 
down the sharp hills of a Kew England toAvn. 

" Is it safe to drive down this hill ?" asked 
my fellow-traveller of a neat, comely woman, 
who stood ironing in the door of a cottage 
perched upon its summit. 

" Yes, if your horses are stead^^ It's half a 
mile long and steep in places." 

We asked her why her husband had chosen 
so high a perch for his house. 

'' Well," she said, " it's a sightly place, and 
Abijah always wants to look off. Eni'ly Susan 
is just like him." 



WEST BO AD. 57 



Then she stepped over the threshold, with 
lier flat-iron in her left hand, and, shading her 
eyes with her right, she slowly swept the Avhole 
range of the horizon. It was a pleasant pan- 
tomime. The children, she said, had gone 
into the valley to school, and would not be 
home till night. The '' men-folks" were 
ploughing in a field below, whence their voices 
could be indistinctly heard. 

" Are you never lonely ?" we asked. 

" It is a little dreary in winter," she replied ; 
" but Abijah and Em'ly Susan like the sound 
of the wind ; and, with the critters and the 
children, we get along." 

Here her flat-iron, touched by her wetted 
finger, sizzed, and we knew that she wanted 
us to go. 

It seemed like driving out into infinite space, 
so little of the highway was to be seen ahead ; 
but our trusty beasts writhed their way hither 
and thither and took us safely down. Half- 
way from the top we came across a horse 
hitched to a plough, feeding in a field. By 
him, with their dinner-pail, sat two red-shirted 
laborers, one of them with a broad white brow. 
This doubtless was Abijah, and we felt sorry 
that, because of the steepness of the way, we 
could not stop and talk with this cheerful phi- 
losopher. Before we got to the foot of the hill 



58 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

a babbling of childish voices reached us, and a 
turn brought us in sight of a little red school- 
house. It was noon, and a bevy of young 
girls were eating their dinners before its door. 
One of them, fairer than the rest, we took to 
be Em'ly Susan. We turned our horses to- 
wards them ; but they flew like fawns into the 
neighboring wood, where we left them. 

I often think of that hilltop cottage, though 
seldom quite as I saw it. Instead, I behold 
it in the solemn stillness of a winter's dawn, 
with its lazily-coiling banner of white smoke, 
and the ironer and Abijah and Em'ly Susan 
" looking off,'' s-s was their wont, at the rosy 
greeting to the snow-clad landscape of a new- 
born day. 

We came directly to another hill, not quite 
so steep, but, like the last, cut off by the hori- 
zon. We toiled up, and, upon the crest of it, 
looked down into the ultima ihiile of so manj^ 
childish dreams, — West Road. 

Just as I had built it, with the square houses 
at the crossing of the roads, the blacksmith- 
shop, the store and its sign, the doctor's office, 
and the meeting-house, — the very same vil- 
lage where the old grandmother had talked of 
webs and preserves and borrowed her receipt 
so many years before ! 

In the blacksmith-shop a brawny man was 



WEST ROAD. 59 

driving nails into the shoe of a clumsy -bodied 
white horse, to whom oats were holiday rations. 
We asked if he had ever heard of my grand- 
father. 

He lifted his right hand, with the hammer, 
to his forehead, as if he would brush cobwebs 
from his brain, and said, — 

" Let me see : old 'Squire A did you 

mean ? Oh, yes ; I've heard my grandmother 
say that he and his wife used to visit in the 
great house yonder." 

'' He was called " 'Squire," was he ?" 

" Wall, yes. He was a justice of the peace, 
and that made a ' 'squire' of him." 

The great house was shut up, and quite gone 
to decay. I looked through its open windows, 
and thought I saw the very corner where my 
grandmother sat and gossipped with the wives 
of the lawyer and minister. 

I asked the blacksmith to tell me the way to 
the old " 'Squire's" farm. 

He laid down his hammer and came to the 
door. 

" You see that road there ? Wall, just go 
straight ahead and that'll take you right to it. 
It's half a mile from East lioad. Don't want 
to buy a clock, do you ?" 

It stood in a corner of the little smithy, — a 
stately timekeeper, from the outworn " great 



^0 OLD TIME CHFLDLIFE. 

house" of West Road, — ticking patiently away 
for the alien ears of another age. 

My first impulse Avas to take and plant it on 
a stairway in a city by the sea. Then I thought, 
How will the aged time-teller stand being car- 
ried out of this quiet village into the great 
seething world beyond ? Who knows but its 
long-used "works," slowly wearing away, will 
get jangled and out of tune in the dissonant 
moiling and toiling of a city ? 

The clock began to strike. It had a wheezy 
voice, but it kept going on and on as if it 
would never stop. 

" I believe the critter's bewitched," sai'd the 
blacksmith. " She's been a little out o' order 
for some time." 

" Kot bewitched, my friend, but going back 
into the bygone." 

I left it, and passed on to East Road. 



CHAPTER VI. 



NOW AND THEN. 



When we drove up to the old farm-house 
it welcomed us just as it did when Benny and 
I went there together forty years before. 
Cattle were lowing to be let out at the pas- 
ture-bars, and its yard was littered with im- 
plements of the day's labors. Just as then 
working men were sitting upon its doorstone, 
and a young girl was coming out with her 
pail. It was as if the dear, bygone days had 
all come back. 

"We went towards the door. The men rose 
respectfully to let us in. A pale-faced woman 
met us, and asked us to walk into her sitting- 
room. We thanked her, but said we would 
stay in the kitchen, — that very same kitchen 
through the windows of which I had seen the 
two old people drop over the top of Merrill's 
Hill on their way to West Eoad. 

Very exactly that day came back to me. I 
remembered how, just after they had gone out 
of sight, an old man called Payne, a harmless 
toper of cider, who wandered about the town, 

61 



62 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

came into the kitchen and sat down unasked. 
His hands made me think of birds' claws, as 
he hekl them by the open fire to warm. He 
was very thin and stooping, and his eyes were 
bleared and bloodshot. When I told him that 
my grandmother was away he seemed pleased, 
and asked if there was any cider drawn. He 
took my grandfather's blue-and-white mug 
from the cupboard in the chimney-corner, and, 
finding it empty, told me I need not trouble 
myself to draw any, as he knew where to find 
it. He shufiled down-stairs with a heavy step, 
and was gone so long that I asked Hannah to 
see what was the matter. Then she scolded 
me for letting him go into the cellar at all, 
and said he was " drinking at the tap." 

When he came up his mug was full, and he 
put it down close to the fire, and sat over it 
and watched it with his rheumy eyes. 

" Has your grandmother any peppers ?" he 
asked. 

I broke one for him from a string in the 
cheese-room, and he dropped it into the mug. 
Then he called for a spoon, and stirred it 
round and round with his skinny old hands, 
smacking his lips the while. 

Little bubbles began to rise to the top of 
the cider, and he said it was " getting mel- 
low." When he carried the mug to his 



NOW AND THEN. 63 

mouth, his hands shook so I thought he would 
drop it. He had no doubt been drinking freely 
at the tap, and was already quite tipsy ; still 
he hardly breathed until he had swallowed the 
last drop. Then he got up and went to the 
door. On its threshold he turned back, but 
it was only to tell me that I was a nice little 
child, and gave old men such excellent, hot 
cider that he wished my grandmother would 
never come back. 

The great fireplace where the old toper 
had warmed his cider, and I had popped seed- 
corn after he was gone, had been bricked up. 
There used to be a crane in it Avith hooks, and 
a trammel. The trammel was a bar full of 
holes, by which the hooks were let down to 
suit the bails of pots. Many quaint things 
belonged to this fireplace. The frying-pan 
was always planted upon a bed of coals in the 
corner, with its handle stretching out upon a 
chair. The toaster turned on a pivot, its 
handle also kept in place by a chair. The 
spit was managed by a crank, and the tin 
baker had a lid with a hinge. Both stood 
wide open to the fire. The tea-kettle, slipped 
back on the crane, kept up a constant sputter- 
ing ; and there seemed to be always hanging 
by it a steaming pot, full of some kind of 
food, which farmers' wives were apt to call 



64 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

" biled victuals." Potatoes were roasted in 
an ash-heap in the corner, where also, if 
properly wrapped, could be baked a light 
cake of meal or flour. 

It seemed but yesterday that I had seen in 
this fireplace its crane heavy with a savory 
burden. 

I love that old farm-house. When in child- 
hood I lived in it, it became mine. Every 
suggestive, homely feature of it touches me. 
Wliy not ? For it is more the using than the 
gilding of objects Avhich makes them truly 
valuable. "Whatever enters into the story of 
your life becomes a part of you ; and many of 
you have yet to learn that the most precious 
things are those which are inlaid with mem- 
ories of the loved and lost. 

I asked the farmer's wife if I might go into 
the garret. 

" To be sure." 

That was the most familiar spot in the whole 
house. One of the first things I saw in it was the 
rusty hook from which used to hang a braided 
string of seed-corn. .This corn was carefully 
chosen for size and fulness, and its intertwined 
husks had to be white as milk. I know about 
it, for I once held the end of the braid whilst 
my grandfather carefully spliced the ears in 
one by one. I remember how his old hands 



NOW AND THEN. 65 



trembled, and how prett}^ the long yellow ears 
looked, standinfy out from the braid. There 
are as many jewels, of good color and shape, 
gathered in at the farmers' harvests as can be 
found in city shops, if one will only see all 
that is to be seen in the beautiful fruits of the 
earth. 

I would have liked to stay longer in the dim, 
memory-haunted old garret, and wished the 
farmer's wife, who had followed me, would 
leave me by myself. She seemed impatient, 
so I reluctantly went down the stairs with her. 
They were just as I remembered them, both 
slanting and slippery. Something seemed to 
clutch at my heart. Dear children, it was 
"the ghost of a day that was dead," — that 
day when the old folks went to West Road, 
and I was left alone to pop corn in the farm- 
house. 

It is thus that memory catches up the slack- 
ened and tangled and broken threads of the 
past, and weaves them into a web for your 
pleasing. It is a marvellous fabric, this web, 
with its brightest end fastened to the beam. 

Shall I tell you how I popped my seed- 
corn ? First, I tried to get into the corn- 
house, but vainly tugged at the ladder lying 
underneath. 

*' What are you doing, child ?" Hannah, the 



QQ OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

maid, called to me. '' Sakes alive ! if it's corn 
you want, I'll break an ear from the seed- 
strino^ in the o:arret. I^one of them in there 
will pop at all. They're as soggy as punk- 
wood. '^ 

I remember that I thought it was hardly 
right for her to take it, although she was a 
long-tried, honest servant; and to this day I 
wonder how, with my reverence for my grand- 
father, I dared to pop an ear of his precious 
seed-corn. I popped it just as my grandmother 
baked her potatoes, or that Indian-meal cake 
wrapped up in cabbage-leaves, which she some- 
times made for us. A bed of hot ashes w^as 
scooped out just inside one corner of the fire- 
place. Into this I dropped a handful of corn, 
covered it with the ashes, and placed around 
it a border of lively coals. Five minutes of 
impatient waiting, — fifteen they seemed ; there 
came a slight shifting of particles in the heap ; 
then a tumbling hither and thither. A puff 
or two of dust, a whiz, a bang, — away they 
went, ashes and white balls all over the hearth 
and well-swept fioor. 

Large-hearted seed-corn will pop nowhere 
so well as in an ash-heap. If you shake thin- 
skinned rice-corn, in a wire-net, on the top of 
a kitchen-range, it will toss up with one spurt, 
but all its grains together will not make so 



NOW AND THEN. 67 

much noise as would one kernel of my grand- 
father's seed-corn, when it hounced out of an 
ash-heap across the kitchen floor. 

The farm-house was not very much changed. 
Its paint had hardly been touched since my 
ancestors' day. Over the east-room fireplace 
were smoke-stains made forty 3'ears before, 
when my grandfather burned out his chimney 
w^ith straw and nearly burned his house as well. 
The kitchen-walls had turned from brick- red 
to brown, and the whole structure was grim 
with a sturdy old age. Strange faces in it hurt 
me. I had to go out of doors for breathing- 
space. I thought I would look for the oven 
of the " golden glory." 

The corn-house was tottering upon three 
legs; the cider-mill was nowhere to be seen. 
The barns were in tolerable order, but the 
shed had a hole in its roof and a door hang- 
ing by one hinge. In its rear my grandmother 
had built her oven. 

A little girl was close at my heels, — a little 
girl with staring eyes and a dirty face and 
mouth wide open. I am sure she thought I 
was crazy. I wished she would go into the 
house. 

How rank the grass was behind the shed ; it 
was full of hardy dock. The little girl asked 
me if I w^ere '' picking greens." 



68 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

" Hush, child," I said, and went on with my 
search. 

It was of no use. The earth was fat and the 
weeds were lush, but never a flat stone could 
I find. 

" Have you lost anything ?" the curious girl 
again asked. 

" Lost anything, child ? I have come a day's 
journey to find the oven in which my grand- 
mother baked her * golden glory,' and where 
is it ?" 

" I haven't done nothing with it. When did 
she bake it ?" 

" More than a hundred years ago." 

Then it came over me how foolish I was to 
think that even stones would stay untouched 
more than a hundred years. I was ashamed. 

The o^irl was afraid of me. She flew like 
the wind to the house ; and directly upon its 
doorsteps swarmed all its inmates, staring at 
me in wonder. 

So persistently do country people treasure 
up the incidents of their quiet lives, that I 
suppose they even yet talk about me with 
their neighbors as that crazy creature who 
came hunting, one summer's day, after her 
grandmother's " golden glory." 

I do not care to tell you the name of the town 
in which East Koad and West Road are to be 



NOW AND THEN. 69 

found. It is called a "hard farming town," 
which means that it is both rocky and hilly. It 
is not many miles aw^ay from a rugged mountain 
range, and seems like an after-toss from that 
great upheaval. If you were to climb up and 
down its tortuous roads, with your eyes earth- 
ward, you might spend all your time pitying 
the beast that bore you, and the men and 
Avomen who wrestle with its slantwise and 
stubborn soil. But, like Abijah and Em'ly 
Susan, when you come to the crown of a hill, 
'^ look off, and then you will behold the glory 
of it." 

East Road on its perch. West Road in its 
hollow, and every other hamlet within sight 
will be melted into the green billows which 
stretch out from the mountain slopes, and the 
beautiful landscape will so delight you that 
you can never afterwards think of that town, 
famous for its hills, without a heart-hunger. 



CHAPTER YIL 

safford's brook. 

Betsy's father lived close by Safford's Brook, 
where it broke through a stone wall and flowed 
under a low arch across the road. Out it came 
from the heart of a wood, mostly of beeches, 
in which, as far as you could see, it was over- 
hung by drooping branches. In these its 
edges were black and soggy, and thick with 
ferns and dogwood. It was also dark and 
gloomy; but just as soon as it got into the 
sunshine, in front of Safford's cottage, it 
began to dance. 

Where it flowed through the hole in the 
wall it dragged out long grasses, which always 
looked as if they were trying to hold them- 
selves back. Then it spread over a gravelly 
bed full of whoel-ruts made by travellers, who 
in summer drove through it to water their 
cattle and horses. 

Watering-places are almost sure to be found 
by country roadsides wherever the highway 
crosses a brook. Most of them are safe, clear 
70 



SAFFOItiyS BROOK. 71 



as crystal, seldom changing bed or aspect. It 
is the delight of boys to wade through them 
with their trousers rolled above their knees, 
and I have seen little girls with their shoes 
and stockings tucked under their arms doing 
the like. Now and then a crossing is quite 
treacherous, with soft bottom, apt to be 
w^ashed out by summer showers, and to play 
pranks with travellers. All are the homes of 
mint, and wild flowers and tiny fishes, which 
dart in and out the low arches of the roadway. 
Horses never seem to trust a path which 
turns from the highway into a brook. First, 
the farmer jumps out and unhooks a check- 
rein. Then the animal cautiously feels his 
way into the middle of the little current, 
where he sniffs and paws and swells himself 
out with long draughts. 

The watering-place of Safford's Brook was 
of the best. It was only a mile away from the 
village of Whitefield Corner, and was much 
beset by boys and girls for its summer gifts. 
Its bottom was sound, and so pebbly that horses 
stirred it in vain for roily drink. Under the 
roadway arch it looked deep and sullen ; but 
when fairly out it spread into a shoal pool, 
the borders of which were packed with mint. 
The wall through which it flowed into a 
field beyond was quite hidden by clematis, 



72 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

and in the field mucli orchis grew. By the 
wall was a bed of bulrushes, and farther on a 
still larger bed of cats'-tail. 

I knew a boy who used daily in summer to 
water a horse at this crossing. He rode his 
beast bare-backed, and clung as closely as if 
he had been a centaur. It was the ugliest 
horse I ever saw, — unevenly mottled with 
chocolate and white, lame of a hind foot, 
with a straggling mane and pinkish eyes. 
The Whitefield children called it the " calico 
horse," and never, outside of a circus, could 
another such strange-looking steed be seen. 
It was very fleet of foot once, and even at an 
advanced age a full dose of oats would set the 
creature up to its old tricks. 

A willow-tree stood close by this watering- 
place, overhanging it Avith long, pendulous 
limbs. The village boys and girls loved that 
tree. They began to tug and hack at it with 
the first putting out of its pussies in spring, and 
its sod was always strewn with twigs. It was 
hardy, and had given to children blossoms and 
" whistle-timber" for many years. 

Did you ever make a willow-whistle ? You 
have not ! Let me tell you how it is done. 
Take your twig, three inches long, while it is 
green and tender witli the first gush of spring. 
Avoid knots and all defects of bark. Cut one 



SAFFORD'S BROOK. 73 

end squarely off, the other obliquely. An inch 
from the sharp point of this oblique end make 
a deep notch in your wood. Below this notch, 
half-way down the stick, draw your knife evenly 
around the bark, cutting through it. Above 
the line thus defined gently pound and mould it 
until it loosens. Then give it a sudden twist, 
and it will slip from its disengaged stock. How 
smoothly it will slide off, and what a pure, 
white, satin surface will come to light ! 

Cut now a slii^ht shavincr from the notch in 
the stick to its point, and the heart of your 
whistle is ready. Wet it well in the mouth 
(nothing but saliva will do), then put it back 
into its socket, and blow a blast which will 
send all the little fishes scampering under the 
bridge, and make the plodding farm-horses 
prick up their ears. 

You have spoiled your first one, have you ? 
You were too impatient; you pounded too hard; 
you were rough, and twisted and cracked the 
bark. Your knife, it may be, Avas not sharp 
enough; though, as I remember, the boys of 
Whitefield Corner used often verj^ dull jack- 
knives for the purpose. 

Old Satford, Betsy's father, was not a hand- 
some man; besides, he Avas a drunkard. Betsy 
got lier red hair from him, and, 1 am sorry to 
say, a very quick temper. Dame Safibrd, as 



74 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

she was called, was a brisk, hard-working little 
body, with twinkling black eyes and a lying 
tongue. She went out washing by the day, and 
was paid twenty-five cents, besides now and 
then old clothes and cold victuals. In winter she 
gathered fagots for fuel from the neighboring 
wood, and once froze her limbs while so doing. 
It was whispered that she w^as a little "light- 
fingered." A ghost glided one night through a 
moonlighted chamber, and the child who saw it 
said it looked wonderfully like Dame Safford. 
The next morninsr some blankets were missino^ 
from a closet, and tracks made to a cellar with 
flour and Indian meal showed that this ghost 
had a fondness for pork. It was the talk of the 
village for a week or more, and the women, 
w^ith a nod of their heads that way, declared 
that the blankets were stored " not a thousand 
miles from the pound." 

Should you ever be told that the oldtime 
women of "Whitefield Corner were great gos- 
sips, do not believe it. They were lynx-eyed and 
had no mercy for bad morals. Sin can never 
hide in Whitefield Corner. Walking along its 
high table-land, with its far-reaching outlook, 
a person becomes, as it were, translucent. The 
converging gaze of its quiet life observes his 
every act. If he is what the country people 
call '' talked about," it is his own fault, for 



SAF FORD'S BROOK. 75 



there is no spot on earth where the sublime 
beauty of a pure life is sooner seen and felt 
than in this same TVhitefield Corner. 

Dame Safford was one of the neatest of 
housekeepers. One could almost taste the 
cleanliness of her sittinsvroom. The boards 
of its floor, worn smooth from much scrub- 
bing, were bossed with shining, thick-set 
knots. From its walls, also of unpainted 
wood, hung a curious medley of things ; and 
upon the jambs of its fireplace were nailed 
loops of leather, into which were thrust pipes 
and knives, the latter much the worse for 
Avear. Its jagged, sunken hearth in summer 
was covered with spruce boughs, which also 
filled the fireplace. A clean bed, a few chairs, 
a table, and a spinning-wheel were the room's 
only furniture, and yet it was delightful. 

Its four open windows looked out upon the 
Avood and the brook, and through them came 
odor of mint and the sweet murmur of running 
water. My dear children, many of you know 
Avhat the tricksy glamour of that Avild scenery 
was ; hoAv its streaks of sunshine glinted across 
the floor; how it curtained the small windows 
with a tender green ; how it made the whole 
air tremulous with a delicious pulsation of 
both color and sound ; how it turned the clean, 
bare room inside out and made my own little 



76 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

heart tlirill with delight. There is nothing in 
poverty more touching than this gikling of it 
by nature. It is as if the ck^ar okl mother 
were trying to make Ufe as bright and easy as 
possible to all her children, and when at last 
they are given back to her she treats them all 
alike. 

The sitting-room of the little cottage by Saf- 
ford's Brook, mean as it was, when washed 
and opened to her eye was caressed by her as 
tenderly as a real mother kisses the face of her 
child. To this day I remember how it seemed 
to absorb outlying brightness. It had a square 
entry, which let you out upon a broad, unhewn 
stone step. There was a rut worn across this 
entry from the sitting-room to the doorstep, 
and the latter was sunk so low in the earth 
that when you sat down on it a whole colony 
of ants ran towards you from its outer edges. 
Close by was a potato-patch and a strip of 
growing corn. Pecking amongst these was 
almost always a hen with a brood of chickens, 
while down by the brookside strutted a gan- 
der and a flock of geese. A cow which pas- 
tured by the roadside had a small shed not far 
off, and when ^' tied up" mooed at you in 
friendly fashion. Betsy used to say that she 
was '' tired to death of the cluck and scratch- 
ing of hens," and as for the gander, " a tater" 



SAFFORD'S BROOK. 77 

could hardl}^ " get a chance to grow under Lis 
everlasting strut." Bees buzzed about a small 
garden-patch, which next to the wood was 
marked out by a row of sunflowers. Flies 
swarmed everywhere, and late in the afternoon 
slanting sunbeams, caught between house and 
wood, were alive with insects. At night, from 
the wxt brookside came a far-reaching chorus 
of frogs. 

I mention all these things because they were 
parts and incidents of that humble living 
w^hich, in spite of its poverty, could not as a 
picture be otherwise than beautiful. There 
was no brighter spot anywhere than Dame 
SafFord's doorstep on a summer day. Still I 
suppose much depended upon the eyes which 
saw it, — whether or not they loved the verdure 
and sunshine and wild music well enough to 
impart to the mean cottage, through their 
glamour, a share of the day's brightness. 

I forgot to tell you when I was inside about 
the mantelpiece and a cupboard in a corner. 
The mantel was very high up and narrow. On 
it were two plaster vases full of mock fruit. 
Between these was an image of praying Sam- 
uel, also of plaster. The bases of them all 
projected half-way beyond the mantel, and 
they had to be tied to the wall. Over them 
hunsT a framed woodcut of Geor^ce Washing:- 



78 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

ton. In front of the four windows dangled as 
many fat balls of thistle-down. If you w^ish 
for the like, pluck largest-sized thistle-blos- 
soms from the roadside, cut off" their pink tops, 
pluck aAvay their green scales, and then hang 
them in the sun. I have known Avise country- 
women to amuse themselves in this way, and 
I do greatly value such innocent pastimes of 
rural life. 

There was always much of what Betsy 
called "green stuff '^ about the room, — spruce 
and pine boughs, asparagus, and tumblers full 
of blossoms between the plaster vases and 
praying Samuel. These were grateful to the 
eye, but I -suppose, after all, that what made 
the place so very pleasant was its cleanliness. 
The corner cupboard was full of odd dishes, 
many of them chipped and cracked. They 
were mostly washing-day gifts, highly prized 
by their owner ; and if variety of shape and 
color has worth, were of great value. They 
w^ere never used, but as things to look at were 
interesting to a curious child. They were 
beautiful pieces to me, and I never see a so- 
called " china collection" that I do not think 
of Dame Safford's corner cupboard. 

Betsy took me up-stairs one day to see her 
" cubby-house." We had to climb a ladder 
and go through a square hole, down upon 



SAFFORD'S BROOK. 79 

which fell a trap-door, " handj," she said, 
when her father was in a " tantrum." This 
euhbj-house was made of stones and old shin- 
gles, and her bits of crockery had been picked 
up from ash-heaps and door-yards. Benny 
and I afterwards spent hours in poking about 
with sticks for specimens. We used to wipe 
the worthless bits upon our sleeves and pol- 
ish them with our hands. I am not sure 
that they were worthless, for they turned rare 
tints and painted posies up to our delighted 
eyes, and nothing is worthless which can give 
innocent pleasure to a child. 



CHAPTER YIII. 



KOCK-WORK. 



Rocks lie broadcast upon the fields of "White- 
field, and a fresh crop of them is always being 
turned up by the plough. An underlying stra- 
tum of rock has made half the town pasture 
land. It keeps coming to the surface of the 
soil, and in one place, on the border-line of the 
neighboring town of Sanapee, it is tilted up 
into a vast, steep ledge, full of seams, and 
called TumbledoAvn Jack, because a horse by 
the name of Jack once fell over it. In the 
town of Sanapee itself it bulges up into a bald- 
topped mountain, to which it gives the name of 
" Gray-face." 

Rattlesnakes, for many years, were common 
on Gray-face, whence, in summer, they came 
down into the plains below\ Pickers of huckle- 
berries had to be on their guard against them. 
One, w^ith seven rattles, killed near Gray-face, 
was brought into Whitefield Corner and nailed 
to the side of a store. All the children in the 
town came to see it. These snakes were killed 
80 



ROCK-WORK. 81 



out by a fire wliicli swept over Gray-face from 
the plains. This was kindled in low bushes, 
some said by boys, and others by a spark 
dropped from a man's pipe. It was in a time 
of drouth, Avhen underbrush and grass were as 
dry as tinder. It lit np the whole horizon at 
night, and sent back great waves of smoke into 
Whitefield, so that through it children could 
look at the sun at midday without winking. 
The air w^as thick with the odor of burned 
earth and pines, and the side of the mountain 
was as if covered with a pall. It was a sublime 
sight at night. I remember how I lay awake, 
and watched the lithe tongues of flame leap 
from tree to tree, devouring as they went. How 
mysterious and potent, yet beautiful, they 
seemed ! I did not w^onder that the heathen 
worshipped God with fire. 

It burned three days. Then the wind shifted, 
and it came slyly creeping, half under ground, 
close up to the outlying fields of Whitefield. 
A fence and a tree caught. Men went out to 
fight it, and little boys cried " fire !" along the 
street. Furrows were made by ploughs, and 
it was beaten back with brush. Meanwhile a 
cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, came sail- 
ing over the crown of Ked Mountain. This 
grew fast, and almost before men's hearts were 
gladdened by sight of it, the little boys said it 



82 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

had begun to sprinkle. Eain had come at last, 
and the foe was conquered. This was the worst 
forest fire the town had ever known. Farmers 
declared that a century would not replace their 
lost timber, and Gray-face was bald to its base. 
It sent, however, no more rattlesnakes into the 
plain, where, in a year or two, the huckleberry 
bushes were thicker than ever. 

Whitefield has been much pitied because of 
the sternness of its soil, but I think its rocks 
are its glory. Its ledges, lying slantwise, fling 
oft' the snow in spring, and smoking in the 
sun, give color and glow to a landscape. In 
summer their deep grays lend variety to it. 
Lathem's pasture would be no pasture without 
rocks ; and Safford's Brook, the sparkling 
waters of which are filtered by a stony bot- 
tom, would lose half its beauty were the nat- 
ural stepping-stones taken away from its bed 
and borders. 

All the houses of Whitefield might have 
been built from its loose-lying rocks; but 
these seem to have been used mostly for the 
making of walls. A stone wall, at first sight, 
seems the roughest kind of a fence, but in E^ew 
England it is a true outcropping of the soil, 
and when left alone quickly clothes itself with 
a beautiful, wild growth. It ought to be last- 
ing, but as it is generally piled it is often 



ROCK-WORK. 83 



otherwise, warping with the first toss of a 
frost. Of this kind are the single ones, having 
hut one thickness of stone, and huilt upon tlie 
surface of the ground. In such thieving boys 
are ready to make a gap, wherever anything 
good to eat is to he found on the other side. 
This is needless, for if ever nature does refuse 
to harm a hoy it is when he is climbing a stone 
wall. 

The double wall, well piled, with a drain 
full of small stones underneath, will last many 
years. When in process of time it has sprawled 
out, it gets matted with raspberry and black- 
berry bushes, and is the favorite home of the 
wild cherry. Bees love the sunny side of it, 
and squirrels are its rightful denizens. De- 
lightful, crazy old wall, with your treacherous 
foothold, how much you give to the children 
who push aside your thorny covering ! 

There was such a w^all around Farmer 
Lathem's orchard, in wdiich the Whitefield 
Corner boys used to make hoards of the old 
man's best fruit done up in hay. It was 
easy to climb, giving access to overhanging 
branches, and lodging apples in its crevices. 
Two sweet-fruited trees were the delight of 
school -children, who wore the wall under 
them into an easy slant, up which they 
walked. The old farmer covered the top of 



'P^'y 



84 OLDTIME CHILD LIFE. 

it with brush, but that was of no use, for out 
of it the young pilferers pulled sticks, with 
which they knocked off their apples. 

The rocks which had been left over from 
the building of this wall were heaped up in 
a corner, and always had the name of being 
snaky. Over this heap a shiny-leaved vine 
ran, which was called ''marcry" by farmers' 
wives. This was poison-iv}^, and once some 
boys, Avho were hoarding apples there, were 
badly damaged by it. Farmer Lathem said 
he saw " the young rascals at work," and it 
made him " chuckle" to think how they w^ould 
be served. 

Whiteiield farmers went out by the day 
building stone walls. They seemed slower 
than snails, but their work grew^ apace. I 
saw Farmer Lathem and his son once tug an 
hour with crow-bars to get a great stone into 
place. This was forty years ago, and it still 
stands in the wall where they put it. Out of 
respect to such hard-working builders how 
can one ever make a gap in a wall ? 

In almost every field in Whitefield was a 
huge bowlder, which had to be let alone by 
the. farmer; and, with its wild growth, bo- 
came a beautiful ornament. A favorite one 
in Lathem's pasture, much resorted to by 
children, was called, from its shape, "Chair 



rock-work: 85 



Rock," and might have seated several giants. 
It was blown to pieces to make room for a 
raih'oad ; but I shall always see that mass of 
granite just as it loomed up to its oldtime 
chiUl-lovers of AVhitefield Corner. I^ear this 
some boys came across a rattlesnake one da}^, 
a truant, no doubt, from Gray-face. It was 
almost buried in a hole, and its outlying tail 
gave them warning, ^one was ever seen 
there before or after, so I suppose this one 
went back to its old haunt. 

A rock by Saftbrd's Brook was famous as a 
fishing-place. It slanted inwards at its base, 
where the eddying brook scooped out a basin, 
in which the water was deep and dark. Here 
trout loved to hide, and barefooted boys, 
hanging over the top of the rock, fished for 
them. 

The "• forehanded" citizens of Whitefield 
Corner all had hewed door-stones and gate- 
posts. Farmer Lathem and his son were 



famous cutters of rock, and the alternate 
strokes of their hammer were as regular as 
clockwork. The best door-stone, however, 
was Farmer Lathem's OAvn, wliich he had 
transplanted, unhewn, from his pasture to 
the low-lying threshold of his door. Worn 
smooth by the peltings of countless storms, 
with uneven but rounded edges, it was full 



86 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

of little hollows, where rain-water settled, and 
its sides were mottled with moss. It sank 
somewhat, and, fringed close with weeds and 
grass, its color of a tender gray, it seemed to 
have sprung, where it was, out of the earth. 
Close by the house there was a hole under- 
neath it. The farmer's wife, coming out one 
morning to sweep the step, found a milk- 
adder, of enormous length, stretched across 
it, which at once ran into the hole. The old 
farmer sought for the snake in vain. He 
said he did not believe it was an adder; 
he '' never thought Judith w^ould lie," but 
"women folks" were ''skeery;" and when 
a woman was " skeered" she couldn't " tell 
a striped snake from an adder." 

Milk-adders were supposed by Whitelield 
people to be poisonous and especially fond of 
milk. All the children believed that, when 
this snake left the door-stone for the hole, it 
was on its way to the woman's dairy, where 
it skimmed all her milk. This was why 
Farmer Lathem, who sold butter and cheese, 
tried to make them think that it was a striped 
snake instead of an adder. 

The most reliable rock-work of "Whitefield 
Corner was to be found in its wells, most of 
which had been faced with stone by Farmer 
Lathem and his son. A well had to be dug 



ROCK, wo UK. 87 



deep there to get below the ledge, under Avliich 
alone could be reached a cool, pure, never- 
failing spring of water. The digging of a 
new well made talk in the village. The ledge 
had to be shattered with powder, and its ex- 
plosion, followed by a low rumbling, made all 
the dishes rattle. Loafers left their taverns 
and hung over the brink of the hole as it 
deepened, enlivening work by stories of wells 
which had " caved in" and buried the men who 
were digging them. When the task was done 
a shout came up from below, and speedily 
every woman in Whitefield Corner knew that 
her neighbor, who was blasting for a well, 
had " struck spring water" at last. 

Toads had a trick of hopping into the wells 
of Whitefield, and buckets of tumbling from 
their handles. It did not matter so much, as 
old Safford, when not in his cups, was always 
ready, for a quarter, to wriggle his way down 
the slippery sides of a well I have a silver 
snuff-box which was fished up from one. It 
was full of snuff when it went down, but 
when brought up by old Safford it was empty. 
Stories of things found in the bottoms of its 
wells have passed into the traditions of the 
town. 

I^ext to the pound, in my day, an old well 
just outside the village had the firmest hold 



88 OLD TIME CHI LB LIFE. 

on the imaginations of the children of the 
Corner. It had not been in nse for more than 
thirty years, and Farmer Lathem said it was 
still " as neat a piece of rock-work" as could 
be " seen anywhere." The house to Avhich it 
belonged had passed awaj^, and not a trace of 
its own wood-work was left. All other de- 
serted wells that I have seen were full of 
rocks and rubbish ; but if you tossed a pebble 
into this one, it would splash into water far 
down. The truth is this well, like the pound, 
was said to be haunted, and though the chil- 
dren would have been ashamed to confess it, 
they were all afraid to go near it. ^Now and 
then one bolder than the rest would creep to 
its brink and peep over, but no one ever saw 
the skeleton which was said to be lying below. 
There was a tradition that the well had " caved 
in and killed a man" who was at work in it, 
hence its evil repute. 

A great rock cropping out of trees, just in 
the edge of Lathem's w^ood, made the best 
kind of a bugbear for the village little ones, 
who used to come flvins: home after nis^htfall, 
declaring that they had seen a ghost. Outside 
of the Avood, close to the roadside, was another 
rock, from which gushed a little stream of 
water. It came hardly faster than a drop at 
a time, but the selectmen put a spout under it. 



ROCK- WORK. 89 



wliicli carried it sparkling into a tub below. 
I hear it now trickling with a tender gurgle 
from its lips of rock, the gift of a woodland 
spring. Travellers stopped to drink from it, 
and boys and girls, open-mouthed, used to 
stoop down and catch it as it ran. The waters 
were pure and cool. They fell over the tub, 
and settled in pools at its base ; but still the 
tinkling little stream kept running from the 
crevice into the spout. Where it came out 
from the rocks a deliciously fine, filtering 
moss gathered, and there was cut a tiny chan- 
nel, smooth as glass. 

Whenever the waters of such a spring could 
be diverted to the roadside it was done, some- 
times by rude spouts, overlapping each other, 
sometimes through the hollow trunks of old 
trees; and often, trickling down hills by the 
side of the road, almost swallowed up by the 
grass and stones as they went, they were 
caught at the bottom. It mattered not into 
what kind of a thing the waters ran, they 
were filtered clean, were cool and never-fail- 
ing, and Avere a delight to the eye. You 
have drank perchance from such a spring. 
There were many scattered over the town of 
Whitefield, kept from drying up in summer 
by its overlying rocks, — its beautiful gray 
rocks, mottled with moss, hard to the touch, 
7 



90 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

but cropping out of the soil, as the heart of it, 
with a vigor and heauty of their own. I 
never read in Isaiah of " rivers of water in 
a dry place" and the " shadow of a great rock 
in a weary land" that I do not think of the 
pure springs, and the restful and beautiful 
rocks of Whitefield. 



CHAPTEE IX. 



DEACON SAUNDERS. 



Half a dozen homes near a little pond 
made up what is called the Saunders ]N"eighbor- 
hood, so named from the old deacon himself, 
whose house, set upon a hill, pointed upwards 
its sharp gables, and joined its gray bulk to 
the earth with a facing and steps of rock-work. 
Although the house itself had been well kept, 
the tooth of time had gnawed its many out- 
buildings, the roofs of w^hich were ragged and 
mossy. It was a very grand old house, with a 
positive air of refinement and respectability. I 
never knew one which seemed more utterly a 
part of the landscape. It had truly mellowed 
into it. Four poplars, old and somewhat dead 
at top, stood before one gable end. Eed Moun- 
tain and Gray-face in the distance; the near 
pond and wood; the outlying fields ; the belfry 
of AVhitefield ; all seemed to belong to it, and it 
to them, — this time-stained, stately, beautiful, 
old structure. 

The farm upon which it stood had been given 

91 



92 OLD TIME CHILDLJFE. 

to the deacon's father, the first minister of the 
parish, who filled his ofiice with great dignity 
and success for fifty years. The deacon himself 
was a man of excellent ability, and had what 
the humbler people called " college learning." 
There was a tradition that he had been set 
apart for the ministry ; but that, falling from 
over-study into ill-health, he betook himself 
to farming. ISText to Parson Meeker he was 
reverenced for his goodness; and truly the 
apostolic beauty of his character was not a whit 
behind that of the parson. He led a blame- 
less life, and no evil word was ever spoken in 
Whitefield of him. When he grew old he was 
called the "good old deacon;" and he was 
permitted for more than half a century to em- 
bellish in his ancestral home a hard-working 
farmer's life with the culture of a Christian 
gentleman. 

Goodness and gentleness seemed to be an 
inheritance of his family. He had a sister 
married to an intelligent farmer, who, because 
of her virtues, always went by the name of 
" Aunt Baxter." Parson Meeker called her a 
" mother in Israel," and got her to rebuke the 
faults of female church members. Betsy de- 
clared that it Avas " a bother to have such a 
saint round." I hear her now, as she sat se- 
rene in a certain village parlor, knitting-work 



DEACON SAUNDERS. 93 



in hand, softly telling one of .the lawyer's wives 
that she and Mrs. Meeker had the name of 
working their hired girls too hard. Her soft 
voice and her dovelike eyes disarmed all ill- 
feeling. 

Like most other Whitefield w^omen, she was 
said to he " good in sickness." How many of 
the oldtime, village mothers, if living, would 
know what that means, — mothers w-ho have 
sat with her through the slow-paced hours of 
night hy the bedside of a beloved child, whose 
pains have been soothed by her noiseless and 
watchful ministrations. A mending patient 
always brightened her face ; and no one was 
more anxious than she for chance to kindle 
hope in aching hearts. Many a mother, at the 
coming of a mocking dawn, has turned, with 
haggard face, to this w^oman, who touched her 
lightly perhaps with a hand, or whispered in 
her ear, changed by such act from a fellow- 
watcher to a ministering angel. 

The deacon's wife, who came from a sea- 
port town, had a certain elegance of mien and 
dress w^hich carried weight with other w^omen. 
I think children were a little afraid of her, for 
she was a very fine lady. She became her 
stately home, in which she dispensed a hospi- 
tality remembered to this day. When Parson 
Meeker, as he sometimes did in summer. 



94 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

preached on Sunday in the red school-house 
of the Saunders Neighborhood, the chief 
women of Whitefield Corner were invited by 
her to luncli. Their children went also, to 
whom it was a great treat to sit on the narrow 
window-seats of her parlor and stare at the 
sea-shells and tall silver candlesticks on the 
mantel. 

The daily life of this farmhouse was de- 
lightful to the looker-on. It was exceptionally 
refined, because its never-ending labor Avas 
borne with ease and dignity. 

Whenever a farmer helped his housewife 
with her tasks, lightening them also the while 
with pleasant speech, her crowded days never 
*' dragged." They were instead, for swift- 
ness, like a weaver's shuttle, and the web of 
them, though plain, had few flaws. Here and 
there, to be sure, on some lonely farm, the 
woman trod her weary round alone ; the hus- 
band always tired and cross. Then, brooding 
unnoticed over her hard lot, which was apt to 
grow harder each succeeding year, such a 
woman has been known to slip off at dusk 
into a garret, with a skein of yarn of her own 
hopeless weaving, and, knotting it to a beam, 
to flino^ her weifirht of care off and launch 
into the great unknown. "Woe to the liouse 
to which this tragedy came ! — haunted ever- 



DEACON SAUNDERS. 95 

more. N'o crueller punishment could heart- 
broken woman inflict upon those who had 
hurt her than the reproach, which never died 
out from a family name, that she had hung 
herself. 

I remember a day in early childhood spent 
most pleasantly in Deacon Saunders's fine old 
house. I found Mrs. Saunders in her kitchen, 
just taking down the lid to her oven, into 
which I looked with her. It was full of bread 
and pies, covered up with pieces of paper, and 
close to its mouth was a sputtering earthen 
pot, over the sides of which trickled a thick, 
brown, toothsome - looking juice. This was 
from an Indian meal and sweet apple pudding, 
the crust of which she tipped up with the end 
of a knife, and said, — 

" It is growing red. I think it will be done 
in season for dinner." 

She told me I might go into the garden 
with her and help her gather some vegetables. 
The garden was as bright as flowers and sun- 
shine could make it, and was noisy with bees. 
When we came back we set our baskets down 
by the shed-door, and Mrs. Saunders blew a 
horn. This was to call Samuel *' to string the 
beans." She said Samuel always broke them 
the right way, and never left any strings be- 
hind. There was a click at the garden-gate, 



96 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

a shuffling down its walk, and a moon-faced, 
middle-aged man came up. "When told that 
he was to ^' string the beans" he said " Yes,'' 
and laughed as if he Avcre very much pleased. 

Mrs. Saunders cut off the top of her beets 
for greens. She did it very carefully, lest by 
bruising the vegetables she should let their 
blood out into the pot. The carrots and 
turnips she scraped quite clean, and pulled 
off the outer leaves from the cabbage. Then 
she washed them all in a great wooden bowl, 
— a beautiful bowl, scooped out of curly maple, 
and full of veins and knots. Samuel drew 
water from a well in the shed with a wind- 
lass, which, when the bucket went down, flew 
round with a whiz ; and, when it came back, 
was very hard to turn. Samuel laughed, and 
the more he had to tus; the better he seemed 
to like it. 

I had never seen a man so fond of laughing, 
and shortly I began to laugh too. Then Mrs. 
Saunders said I had better not, for if Samuel 
once got started he didn't know how to stop. 
When I told Betsy about him, she exclaimed, 
" Why, bless me, child, didn't you know he 
was a fool ?" And, afterwards, I heard Farmer 
Lathem tell a man who was helping him in a 
shower, that he wished he had a " critter like 
Samuel," for if there was " one thing handier 



DEACON SAUNDERS. 97 

than another to have about a farm" that thing 
was a fool. 

I liave told, you of the getting of these veg- 
etables that you may know what made the 
dinner so good; and why what rough farmers 
call " garden sass," and when cooked " biled 
vittles," makes about the poorest kind of a din- 
ner when bought from a stall, but is admirable 
when taken fresh from the earth and properly 
cooked. 

The flavor of an oldtime boiled dinner has 
trailed down to many people, through the flesh- 
pots of to-day, with a pleasant relish ; and, de- 
spite the gibes flung at ^' garden sauce," does 
not seem to have been supplanted by better. 
Here it is, just as my grandmother served it. 
A large piece of corned beef, with a square of 
pork, both boiled tender, in the centre of a 
platter, hedged in by cabbage dotted with 
potatoes. A side dish of blood-red beets, 
another of sliced yellow turnips, and still 
another of parsnips afloat in butter. Lastly, a 
tureen of golden squash, seasoned with care 
and skill. It was a beautiful dinner to look 
at, colored like earth's best jewels. Common 
farmers' wives served these vegetabks together 
on one large platter, and with them a mug of 
hard cider. The Indian pudding, flavored 
with sweet apples, which came after, was the 



98 OLD TIME CHI LB LIFE. 

one oldtirae triumph of skilled hands, the 
aroma and relish of which cannot even be 
simulated by common labor. 

My grandmother used to say that a " boiled 
dinner" to be well cooked must be put to stew- 
ing early in the morning, — the meat started 
first, and the vegetables added, one after an- 
other, as their fibre required ; all in the same 
pot, with the exception of the squash and the 
beets ; the squash being dryer when steamed, 
and. the beets having a trick of turning ever}^- 
thing else red. My grandmother also said 
that some women-folks thought a '^ boiled 
dinner the easiest kind to get ;" but it always 
made her " busy the best part of a day." The 
pot, she said, '-' must be kept simmering, and 
the soul of the meat must go into the hearts 
of turnips and cabbage and potatoes and pars- 
nips, and butter must go into them all." 

I ate my dinner from a large tray on a stand 
by the window of an inner room, which over- 
looked the little pond, and from which one 
could see the belfry of "Whitefield Corner. 
Mrs. Saunders put me there, she said, because 
the deacon, who was " breaking up a piece of 
pasture-land," had " a gang of men to work 
for him," and she did not think it would be 
pleasant for me to eat with them. I saw 
them, however, through the open door, around 



DEACON SAUNDERS. 99 

their table, red-shirtecl and bronzed. Samuel 
sat opposite to the door; and, when he spied me, 
began to laugh in such a helpless way that Mrs. 
Saunders had to shut me up in my little eating- 
room by myself. 

I remember with delight that room, with its 
ceiled walls painted a dull blue ; its fireplace in 
one corner, and opposite to it a triangular cup- 
board. It w^as exquisitely neat, and had that 
half-sadly suggestive air that all rooms have 
which are shaped and furnished after the fash- 
ions and usage of a past age. 

The deacon's garden was the finest country- 
garden I ever saw. It was half as large as his 
orchard, and through it, from the back-door of 
the house to the latter, ran a broad, straight 
path. Two-thirds of it was taken up by green- 
sward, in which stood a number of pear- and 
cherry-trees. It was indeed a kind of vestibule 
to the orchard, into which it opened by a gate. 
Currant- and gooseberry-bushes grew along its 
walls, and close by the gate was a great clump 
of lilacs. The vegetable-beds were fringed 
with flowers, and red and white rose-bushes 
grew on either side of the broad path. Aspar- 
agus was planted in a corner for its tender 
green sprays, with which every Saturday Mrs. 
Saunders filled her parlor fireplace. 

Somebody was always at work in this gar- 



100 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

den. A head was sure to be bobbing up and 
down somewhere in it. It was the storeroom 
and resting-place of the house. I have never 
seen such a phice for bees as it w^as. As if the 
wild ones were not enough, the deacon must 
go and plant a hive of them in a corner next 
to the orchard, so that in midsummer there 
was hardly a flower to be seen without a bee's 
head buried in it. The Whitefield boys said 
the bees were put in the garden to keep them 
out. I should not wonder if it were so, for 
a child could not thrust its arm throu2:h the 
fence for a bunch of currants without having 
half a dozen of them after its ears. 

Another farmer whom I knew had a hive of 
bees, which swarmed upon his hat while he 
was weeding a carrot-bed. It was almost din- 
ner-time and he was tired and hungry ; but he 
did not dare to speak or move. His hat grew 
heavy, and the rustle of the bees was like a 
roar in his ears. He heard a clock strike twelve. 
Somebody blew a tin horn at the back-door. 
Dinner was ready. The horn made the bees 
drop in strings from the brim of his hat like 
a fringe. He heard his wife call "Peter! 
Peter !" all over the house. Still, he was 
afraid to speak. She went into the barn, calling 
" Peter!" again, in a scared sort of way. He 
had half a mind then to answer, but the bees 



DEACON SAUNDERS. 101 



were getting a little uneasy. It seemed hours 
to the farmer before the click of his garden- 
gate told him that somebody was coming. Just 
at that moment a string of bees dropped from 
his hat's brim, and one or two of them rose 
from its crown. Then the whole mass lifted, 
and, with a whir and a whiz, went sailing over 
apple-trees and orchard into a wood beyond ! 
The bees were lost, but the farmer had gotten 
not so much as a sting. For a long time after 
this saucy boys had a way of asking him if 
he had a bee in his hat. 

Deacon Saunders's front-yard was as delight- 
ful as his garden. I shall never forget its porch, 
nor its terraces, full of rose-bushes, let down to 
the street by an easy slant of unhewn, moss- 
grown steps, nor yet the varied landscape be- 
yond it. This porch, I am told, still stands, 
somewhat disguised by paint, and the mossy 
steps are said to have kept their integrity to 
this day. The garden was, however, the most 
changeful spot, with its successive crops of 
vegetables and flowers. 

Did you ever have an old-fashioned flower- 
bed in a country-garden, — a long, narrow strip 
of mellow earth, sown crosswise, in rows, with 
various kinds of seeds ? You sprinkle these 
seeds in little furrows, a foot apart, pat a thin 
layer of earth over them, and wait. After a 



102 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

warm shower some late May mornincr yon find 
your bed full of ridges, with here and there a 
crack. In a few hours these cracks have run 
along the ridges, and from them spring a host 
of tiny leaves, most of them in pairs. You 
can almost see them grow. Some shoot up 
fast and are full of color; others lag and are 
pale, and you sever them by a careless touch. 
Such are the delight of bugs ; and there lurks 
underneath them all a great, fat, sluggish 
worm, ready to devour them. Be careful not 
to confound weeds with your flowers. Pigweed 
and chickweed and parsley are your vegetable 
foes; although there is some excuse for the 
last named in the fact that, when boiled, it 
makes excellent greens. Worse than all else 
are the hens, who love to burrow in soft, gar- 
den mould. 

If you find a toad in your bed let it stay, 
for bugs and worms are its natural food. It 
will grow fat and old in your service, and you 
will learn to watch for its coming in the spring. 
If it raises a family of toads, keep them too, 
for they will do you much good and no harm. 
I love to watch them on hot days, half buried, 
and turning up their pulsating little throats and 
twinkling eyes. 

The Whitefield children declared that toads 
gave people warts. I do not believe it ; but, lest 



DEACON SAUNDERS. 103 

you may sometimes have warts, I will tell you 
how they tried to cure them. The most com- 
mon method Avas to rub them with a pea, and 
then to throw the pea into a well. Another 
way, quite as sure, was to cover them with the 
juice of milkweed. It was often said that by 
using certain magic words one could charm 
warts from his own hands to the hands of an- 
other. But those words I shall not tell you, 
lest in an evil moment you may be guilty of 
such wicked transplanting. 



CHAPTER X. 

FIRES. 

Betsy had the reddest hair of any girl I 
ever knew. It was quite short in front, and 
she had a way of twisting it, on either temple, 
into two little huttons, which she fastened with 
pins. The rest of it she brought quite far up on 
the top of her head, where she kept it in place 
with a large-sized horn comb. Her face was 
covered with freckles, and her eyes in winter 
were apt to he inflamed. She always seemed to 
have a mop in her hand, and she liad no respect 
for paint. She was as neat as old Dame SaiFord 
herself, and was continually " straightening 
things out," as she called it. Her temper, 
like her hair, was somewhat fiery ; and, when 
her work did not suit her, she was prone to 
a gloomy view of life. If she was to he be- 
lieved, things were always " going to wrack 
and ruin" about the house; and she had a 
queer way of taking time by the forelock. In 
the morning it was " going on to twelve 
o'clock," and at noon it was " going on to 
midnight." 

lOi 



riRES. 105 



She kept lier six kitclien chairs in a row on 
one side of the room, and as many flatirons in 
a line on the mantel-piece. Everything- where 
she was had, she said, to " stand just so ;" and 
woe to the child Avho carried crookedness into 
her straight lines ! Betsy had a manner of her 
own, and made a Avonderful kind of a courtesy, 
with which her skirts pufted out all around like 
a cheese. She always courtesied to Parson 
Meeker when she met him, and said, " I hope 
to see you well, sir." Once she courtesied in 
a prayer-meeting to a man Avho offered her 
a chair, and told him, in a shrill voice, to " keep 
his setting," though she was " ever so much 
obleeged" to him. This was when she was 
under conviction, and Parson Meeker said he 
thought she had met with a change of heart. 
Farmer Lathem's wife hoped so too, for then 
" there would be a chance of having some 
Long-noses and Pudding-sweets left over in 
the orchard." 

It was in time of the long drouth, when 
fire ran over Grayface, and a great comet 
appeared in the sky. Some of the people of 
Whitefield thought the world was coming to 
an end. The comet stayed for weeks, visible 
even at noonday, stretching its tail from the 
zenith fixr towards the western horizon, and, 
at niglit, staring in at windows with its eye 



106 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

of fire. It was the talk of the people, who 
pondered over it with a lielpless wonder. I 
recall two Whitefield Avomen as they stood 
one morning, hare-armed in a doorway, star- 
ing at and chattering ahout it. One says they 
might " as well stop work" and "" take it 
easy" while they can. The other thinks the 
better way is to "keep on a stiddj^ jog until it 
comes." They wish they knew '' how near it 
is," and " Avhatthe tail means anj^way." 

Betsy comes along with a pail, which she 
sets down, and then looks up to the comet. 
The air is dense with smoke from Grayface, 
and the dry earth is full of cracks. 

Betsy declares that it is "going on two 
months since there has been any rain." 
Everything is "going to wrack and ruin;" 
and " if that tiling up there should burst, 
there'll be an end to Whitetield." 

Then she catches sight of me, listening, 
wide-mouthed, and she tells me that I needn't 
suppose she is " going home to iron m}^ pink 
muslin," for she thinks the tail of the comet 
" has started, and is coming right down to 
whisk it off from the line." I believed her, 
and distinctly remember the terror that took 
hold of me as I rushed home and tore the 
pink muslin from the line, lest it sliould be 
Avhisked off by the comet's tail. 



FIRES. 107 



When the drouth broke, a single day's rain 
washed all the smoke from tlie air. Directly 
the tail of the comet began to fade, and all of 
a sudden its fiery eye went out of the sky. 

Some of the villagers thought it had " burst," 
others that it had " burnt out." Bets}^ said, 
"Whatever it was, it was a humbug;" and 
the wisest man in Whitefield could neither 
tell whence it came nor whither it went. One 
thing, however, was certain, — Farmer Lathem 
said that never, since his orchard began to 
bear, had he gathered such a crop of apples 
as he did, despite the drouth, in the year of 
the great comet. 

Any exceptional motion of the elements 
makes a deep impression in the country. 
Freaks of lightning, the burning of buildings, 
freshets, whatever is out of its usual course, 
stirs up its inhabitants. Passing through the 
shaded street of Whitefield Corner, Avhosc 
quiet is so profound that the buzzing of an in- 
sect catches the ear of a lounger, one can hardly 
realize how such things affect its indwellers. 

A store burned once at midnio'ht in this 
village. The darkness was intense, and rain 
fell in torrents. I remember how I was 
awakened by a strange sound. I heard the 
pouring rain, and the swollen waters of Saf- 
ford's brook sullenly roared. Through these 



108 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

natural voices pierced a needle-sharp cry, be- 
gun at the far end of the village, coming 
nearer, taken up in chorus, and suddenly ring- 
ing out with a fearful distinctness, — 

" Fire !— fire !— fire !'' 

As if by magic, every man in the place 
was out upon the street and caught up the cry. 
Women and children stood, Avith faces flat- 
tened against panes, vainly staring out into a 
darkness blacker than the smoke which had 
begun to filter through the cracks of doors and 
w^indows. The uproar grew louder, and horns 
were blown. There w^as a crazy old belfry 
where the village spire now is, but there was 
no bell in it. 

" "What is it V' the women called out through 
the storm, and here and there an answer was 
shouted back, " It is Doe's store, and there is 
powder in the cellar." 

A gleam of light came at the corner, where 
two roads meet, and a great tongue of flame 
leaped up into the sky, bringing out the old 
belfry like a skeleton, and men were seen run- 
ning wildly about the street. They had no 
buckets, for the rain poured and poured, and 
the powder kept them away from the store. 

The fire had caught near the roof, which 
first burned through. Then the flames went 
boring down into the sale-room. When they 



FIRES. 109 



had lighted up the lower windows, making a 
ghastly show of the motley goods w^ithin, men 
and hoj's went flying away and all cries ceased. 
Everybody was w^aiting for something. The 
flames licked up the goods, broke through the 
windows, and, as if the little village Avas not 
red enough, fed upon rum and oil. Suddenly 
a compact stream of sparks shot far above the 
old belfry, and with it came a dull roar, which 
shook the whole village. The fire had gotten at 
the powder. Women and children screamed, 
but the men rushed out and, strange to say, 
began to cry " fire" again. 

The mischief, however, was over. Much 
glass had been broken and brands flung about. 
Men, forming in a line, passed pails of water 
from hand to hand, and, with help of the rain, 
quenched whatever had kindled. The glare 
died out of the sky, and, save a little sullen 
glow behind the belfry at the Corner, the night 
went back into its darkness. 

It was hard for the scared and drenched vil- 
lagers to return again to quiet and sleep, but 
they did it ; and in hardly more than an hour 
after the explosion one could hear only the 
splashing of the rain and the roar of Saflbrd's 
brook. The next day there Avas left to remind 
one of the past night's tumult only a thin, 
feebly curling smoke from a heap of embers, 



110 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

which children Avere poking over with sticks. 
This fire, however, did not pass from the mem- 
ory of the village children. In a city a whole 
block might have burned and, save for the 
trmidling past of engines, not an outside 
sleeper would have stirred. But in the little 
village of Whitefield Corner every fold and 
freak of the fire-fiend were held in memory by 
its terrified inhabitants. They brooded over 
the scene and talked about it. They passed 
over to their children from year to year the 
story of the burning of Doe's store, with 
powder in its cellar, until it was as much to 
the village as the great fire was to London. 

There was a seam in the top of the old 
belfry, made by lightning, which was seen by 
Dame Saffbrd to fall upon it like a ball of fire. 
ISTot long afterwards a man with lightning-rods 
for sale stopped in the village, and one of 
them would have been put upon the belfry 
had not old Farmer Lathem declared that to 
his mind lightning-rods were " humbugs." 
He said, '' I have lived in Whitefield going on 
seventy years, and the first house has yet to 
be burned in it by lightning.'' He looked 
upon chimneys as *' about the best things for 
lightning to run down on ;" and, if folks were 
" skeery," they could " kiver themselves up 
in feather beds." '' The strangest case of 



FIRES. Ill 



strikinsr" he had ever known was that of his 
brother John's wife, who, sitting by an open 
window in a shower, " had lier voice knocked 
straight out of lier by a streak of lightning 
and never got it back again." But it might 
have been worse. *' You have no idee," he 
said, "how agreeable a dumb woman can be." 
lie wound up by declaring that, " for one," 
he was " asrin the lifrhtnino:-rod." 

Whitefield was famous for its heavy showers. 
In how many hot July and August afternoons 
have I seen a bank of fleecy clouds hanging 
over the summit of Eed Mountain take on 
lurid edges, grow dark, stretch along the hor- 
izon, and spread into the zenith. Working- 
men stop to eye them, and say to each other, 
"A shower is coining up." The schoolmis- 
tress puts her head far out of a window, 
turning it this way and that, and tells her 
scholars they had "better run home, for it 
begins to lighten." There is a hurrying and 
scurrying among the village women, who 
are carrying " things in out of the rain." 

When a storm-cloud broke over Whitefield 
Corner, its thunder went echoing in and out 
the ridges of Ked Mountain and Gray face 
and their fellows like the roar of artillery. 
It seems to me that I have never heard any 
ffound more solemn than the long-continued 



112 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

rumbling and muttering in the night-time of 
thunder among the outlying hills of "White- 
field. Somebody told me, when I was a very 
little child, that it was God's voice, and I be- 
lieved it. This gave me no fear. Instead, it 
filled me with a tender awe. How vividly I 
remember my often-repeated storm-worship, 
the conditions of which were peculiar, I 
think, to the mountainous locality of White- 
field ! When a near shower had spent its 
force it seemed to be continually repeating 
itself elsewhere. The thunder, with a muffled 
roll, followed the march of its clouds. When 
it grew deep and long, I knew that it must be 
far away ; and as it was dying out, I recall a 
certain indescribable, delicious sadness of low, 
prolonged sound, out of which I used to drift 
into the utter silence of sleep. 

Often the storm-cloud " passed over," as the 
villagers used to say ; and then it was apt to 
" burst" near the little pond just outside the 
village, the shore of which was bounded by 
the old graveyard and the farm of Deacon 
Saunders. This pond had such a name for 
^' drawing lightning" that, whenever a very 
loud clap of thunder came, people would 
wonder if something in the Saunders iNTeigh- 
borhood had not been struck. The chimney 
of the deacon's house was jagged on one side ; 



FIRES. 113 



and, for many years, several bricks lay loose 
upon its roof. Cliildren pointed with pride 
to these as havins; been there ever since the 
house was struck by lightning. The old 
deacon told them how he, sitting in the 
kitchen at the time, was stunned, and his 
wife, who was knitting not far from him, had 
numbness in her hands for several days after. 
The lightning followed the chimney into the 
cellar, where it played a few pranks, and then 
went ploughing into the earth. 

In a field not far from the house was a great, 
one-sided elm. Half of it had been torn off 
by lightning ; and the tree had healed with a 
ragged, deep-set scar. The deacon's best pair 
of oxen were standing under the tree when 
it was struck, fastened together by a yoke, 
which was much burned. The oxen were 
instantly killed; and, strange to say, though 
their heads, in front of the yoke, were roasted, 
not a hair of them on the other side was 
singed. Farmer Latliem said he had never 
seen a '* neater job of cooking." 

I w^as once caught in the deacon's house by 
a shower. I hear him now calling to his men, 
" Hurry up, for there is a heavy thunder-cloud 
over the top of Red Mountain, and it is coming 
fast this way !" His wife repeats to me, " A 
heavy shower is coming over the top of Red 



114 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

Mountain, and you must stay, child, until it is 
over." 

I shall never forget that shower; its pre- 
ceding hush and gloom, followed by a deluge 
and o'lare and the continued crashins: of thun- 
der. Once we thought the chimney had been 
struck again, and the deacon went up into the 
garret. . At the same time his wife, looking 
out of the window, spied the shivered elm and 
the oxen lying under it, half buried in green 
branches. The rain poured, and slackened 
only to gather fresh fur}^ Our eyes were 
half blinded with lightning, and all sensation 
seemed swallowed up in sound. This thunder- 
storm, like the burning of Doe's store, was re- 
membered as an epoch in the history of White- 
field. Every shower that came afterwards was 
" nothing to the one in which Deacon Saun- 
ders's oxen were killed under an elm-tree." 



CHAPTER XI. 



PARSON MEEKER. 



Parson Meeker was treated with great re- 
spect by the viUage chiklren. The boys took 
off their caps and the girls dropped a courtesy 
Avhen they met him, although, I am sorry to 
say, such was their awe of him, that the cry 
" Parson Meeker's coming !" was apt to send 
them flying into lanes and flelds. He had a 
way of stopping children and talking to them 
which ought to have made saints of them all, 
but they did not seem to like it. Betsy said 
one day that it was "just a waste of breath," 
— that he " might as well talk to the winds;" 
for the children of Whitefield, if the " hook- 
ing of pears and apples" was stealing, were 
" born thieves." 

Parson Meeker called himself a Grahamite. 
Most of the children thought a Grahamite was 
a tall, thin person, who wore spectacles and a 
white neckcloth, and whose business it was to 
keep them out of mischief. Betsy told me it 
meant a " spleeny man," who ate no meat, and 

115 



116 OLDTTME CHILDLIFE. 

was " notliin but a rack of bones." ]^o mat- 
ter how much the parson's abstinence from 
meat may have abated his weight, it took 
nothing from his length of daj^s. ^o stranger 
could have failed to know him as the minister 
of the village ; not so much because of his 
white neckcloth as of his unaffected air of 
piety, which almost gave him the look of apol- 
ogizing for being in this wicked world at all. 
He was without guile, walking in and out his 
blameless way, preaching as much by the pu- 
rity of his daily life as by his sermons. Gen- 
tle of manner and wise of speech; slow to 
take offence, but ready always to rebuke sin; 
like the good old doctor of East Eoad, he was 
held up as an example to sons, who were ex- 
horted by their mothers to " grow up to be as 
good as Parson Meeker." His name and his 
influence can never die out of Whitefield. 

Every Sunday he preached two long ser- 
mons, each with five heads, and each head 
itself divided. After the fifthly came an 
application, with an exhortation at its close. 
The sermons were called very able, or more 
often " strong discourses." I used to think 
this was because Mrs. Meeker had stitched 
their leaves fast together. Betsy said they 
were just like Deacon Saunders's "breaking- 
up plough," and went " tearing right through 



PARSON MEEKER. 117 



sin." The pnrson, wlicu I knew liim, was a 
little slow of speech and dull of sight. He 
sometimes lost his place on his page. IIow 
afraid I used to be lest, not finding it, he should 
repeat his heads ! He always brought himself 
up with a jerk, however, and sailed safely 
through to the application. When that came 
Benny almost always gave me a jog with his 
elbow or foot. Once he stuck a pin into my 
arm, which made me jump so that Deacon 
Saunders, who sat behind, waked up with a 
loud snort. The deacon was alwavs talkino; 
about the sermons being "powerful in doc- 
trine." When Benny asked Betsy what doc- 
trines were, she told him to " let doctrines 
alone;" that they were " pisen things, only fit 
for hardened old sinners." 

The parson's congregation, not large in 
summer, was very small in winter. The meet- 
ing-house was warmed in cold weather by two 
large stoves, fed with green wood, which sel- 
dom got well kindled before the sermon be- 
gan, and, if Betsy was to be believed, many 
worshippers had " caught their death-a-colds" 
in spite of them. The stoves stood in front 
of two doors, and their funnels, running the 
length of the aisles to the .chimney behind, 
were strung at their joints with tin-pails, to 
catch the acid which dripped througli them. 



118 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

The pretty girls of Whitefield, especially when 
they had gotten new hats or cloaks, used to 
stop before the stoves to warm. 

In summer, with its wide-open windows and 
doors, the meeting-house was a pleasant place 
for children, Avho through them drowsily 
watched the outlying world. So unvarying 
was the congregation that a new-comer made 
a stir, and any disturbance of the service was 
much talked over afterwards. 

In the middle of a sermon one summer's 
day a strange man drove w^ildly up to one of 
the meeting-house doors, and, jumping out 
upon its threshold, called out with a loud 
voice, — 

" Is Doctor Jones present ?" 

Deacon Saunders stood up in his pew and 
said, "He is not." 

Then the man wanted to know if there was 
a storekeeper in the house. This time two 
men rose, and the stranger asked if cither of 
them had any paregoric, adding that his 
brother was very sick. 

One of them, who had a harelip, answered 
as well as he could, " I keep paregoric," and 
went down the aisle to the man in the door, 
who took him into his wagon and drove off 
very fast to the corner, where the stores were. 
This all came to j)ass so quickly that tlie chil- 



PARSON MEEKER. 119 



dreii never tliougbt to laugh ; and wlicn the 
man flew past again with his paregoric, they 
were still wide-mouthed with wonder, while 
the parson had but just found his place in his 
sermon. 

This sounds queerlj, hut it happened more 
than forty years ago, in the meeting-house at 
Whitefield Corner; and the sickness of the 
brother of that strange man from Boston, wlio 
thus invaded its worship, was the talk of the 
village women for several weeks. They never 
rested until they found out what ailed the 
patient, how soon the doctor got to him, and 
whether the paregoric did him any good. 

]S"ow and then Farmer Lathem's little dog, 
which on Sundays was always shut into a 
shed, would get out and follow his owner to 
church; but he did no more than to eye the 
people curiously from the doorway, and then 
at a shake of his master's head would trot 
home again. Once only he concluded to come 
in, and perched himself in one of the chairs in 
front of the pulpit, where he looked so sur- 
prised that everybody laughed. Parson Meeker 
stopped in the middle of his sermon, and said 
he was " sorry to see signs of levity in the con- 
gregation ;" and then Farmer Lathem snapped 
his fingers at the dog, who jumped down and 
followed him out of the meeting: -house. Alariire 



120 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

striped snake one Sunday crawled tliroiigli an 
entry into one of the aisles, and the people 
who saw it buttoned the doors of their pews. 
The parson looked over the top of his spectacles 
and frowned: there was such a rustle on that 
side of the meeting-house ; but it stopped di- 
rectly, for the snake glided out just as it came. 
The next day all the boys in Whitefield Cor- 
ner might have been seen poking under the 
meeting-house steps with sticks and stopping 
up their chinks with stones. 

The men who were church members took 
care of the meeting-house by turns, and once 
a year all the hard-Avorking women of the vil- 
lasre turned out to clean it. Durino; the sum- 
mer spiders spun their w^ebs on its windows 
unmolested, and caught flies to the amusement 
of children. Now and then a bumble-bee flew 
in through the open windows and buzzed un- 
comfortably near their heads; and one summer 
a nest of wasps, somewhere back of the meet- 
ing-house, bothered its worshippers. One of 
them got inside the sleeve of a young girl and 
made a stir in the singing seats. 

The first meeting-house of the tow^n, which 
was followed by the one at the Corner, stood 
close by the pond of the Saunders iTeighbor- 
hood, almost surrounded by ancient pines. Its 
situation, elsewhere imperfectly described by 



PARSON MEEKER. 121 

me, was of surpassing beauty. It had ceased 
to be used as a place of worship in my child- 
hood, when boys and girls hunted for birds' 
nests amono:st its ruins. It was one of the 
quaintest of its kind, with a huge sounding- 
board and a railed platform built up in its centre 
for siniirers. I do not believe the oldest resident 
of the Corner could exactly tell what became 
of the timbers of this ancient meeting-house. 
Bricks there were none, for it had no chimney. 
After its desertion for the more populous village 
site it gradually fell apart, until, as in the case 
of the old pound, before anybody thought of it, 
its bared foundation, which adjoined the burial- 
place, had been given up to new-made graves. 
It has still, however, a phantom existence; 
and, keeping alive its shape and its uses. White- 
field people love to talk of " the old meeting- 
house." 

The road from it led by an casj' slant to the 
summit of a liill, which overlooked the Cor- 
ner, and on which lived a doctor as famous in 
the town as was the skilful surgeon in East 
Koad. His wife, who had a witty tongue, was 
very kind to the poor, and was deft with her 
needle. Her two little girls wore ruffled tiers 
and pink sun-bonnets, and were envied by many 
children. Down the hill, which in winter was 
much clogged by snow, Moses used in summer 



122 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

to drive liis stage at a furious rate. "When a 
great clatter was heard by the Corner people, 
they said, " The stage is coming down the 
doctor's hill." 

His great house has had a sharp gahle 
mounted on its square roof, and has been 
stripped of its weather-stained shingles. In- 
deed, the thing has been born again, out of a 
venerable, stately old age, into the aspect of an 
aggressive youth, and this is why I go back to 
the simple incidents of its past. Too simple ! 
perhaps you ^2^j. Still, I think any thirsty 
old traveller may be suffered for a little, on the 
dusty highway of life, to indulge in that harm- 
less, childish delirium which comes from dal- 
lying with the ghosts of things which belonged 
to his 3'outh. 

How long ago those summer Sundays seem ! 
Their delight was a real thing, not an after- 
creation of fancy. There was one service, too, 
seldom given, which I would travel very far to 
take part in. It was when a tankard and four 
cups, not of silver, but scoured bright, with a 
spotless cover over them, stood on the little 
table in front of the pulpit in the meeting- 
house at "Whitefield Corner. The parson came 
and sat on one side of the table, and the mild- 
eyed deacon sat on the other. The twain lifted 
the covering, and the parson, having asked 



PAIiSOX MEEKER. 123 

those who were in good and regular stand- 
ing with Christian churches to commune with 
them, said, "Let us praj-." The house was 
hushed, and, when tlie deacon took up his 
office, the dropping of a pin coukl he heard. 
I see and hear it all : the scattered hut ohserv- 
ant worshippers ; the little company in front ; 
the children curious and awe-struck; the hright 
outer world; the silence, hroken only by the 
slow tread of the deacon. I used to think, 
and I think now, that there can he no more 
solemn gathering than of the little hand which, 
in the quiet and beauty of that open village 
church, led by their devout, trembling, old 
minister, communed in spirit in the very ves- 
tibule of the unseen world. 

The parson had a daughter, Margaret by 
name, whose young life, cut off in its early 
bloom, was so bright and comely while it 
lasted, that the story of it is to this day help- 
ful and sweet to the young girls of Whitefield. 
She passed away by a slow and sure consump- 
tion, bred, perhaps, by the altitude of White- 
field, which is perched in a stratum of upper 
air. She had great eyes, wdth a far-away look; 
and when she came into the meeting-house all 
the young people watched her, because she was 
so stately. There was hardly anything sug- 
gestive of decay about her illness. She walked 



124 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

lier beautiful wa}^, loving and beloved. By 
and by she gradually withdrew herself, but 
was still to be found at home, gracious as ever. 
Then one day she lay down and never rose 
asiain. 

After the second service came the Sabbath- 
school. It began at five o'clock in summer 
and held in to the gloaming. It w^as made up 
of the village children gathered in the meet- 
ing-house, who recited in monotone long pas- 
sages from the J^ew Testament. They re- 
peated the beatitudes, the beautiful parables, 
and that sweetest and saddest of all stories. 
Classes sat in pews far apart all over the meet- 
ing-house, and were prompted mostly by 
^vomen, who were very particular about their 
recitations, and insisted that all the little words 
should be put in their right places. 

Deacon Saunders, who taught a class of boys, 
explained the verses to them ; and he was so 
learned that Benny, wdio w^as one of them, 
could not understand the meaning of half he 
said. My teacher was the handsomest woman 
in the school. The girls all looked up to her, 
for she had a sister in Boston, and lived in the 
largest house in the village, with a front-yard 
full of lilacs. The scholars were all fond of 
flowers, and almost every child brought a posy 
of some kind. To this day I recall the pang 



PARSON MEEKER. 125 



of envy with which, one Sunda}^, I watched a 
white daffodil, hekl in the hand of a little girl 
who sat in the pew next me. 

The parson always came to the school, and 
taught a Bihle-class in the singing seats, 
where the slanting sunheams streamed across 
his ao^cd head. 

The verses recited hy the several classes 
"svere not the same, but heard from without, 
they mingled together as if uttered by one 
voice. The deacon pitched a tune, the parson 
took it up, teachers and scholars joined in ; 
and this music, unskilled though it was, was 
mellowed by the outer air. So also was the 
tremulous prayer that came after. 

Sometimes a farmer, going past wdth his 
cows, mio-ht be heard callino- to them with a 
loud " hurrup," but nobody laughed. When 
daylight began to fade out of the room, all 
babble of tongues would cease, and the little 
band dispersed, each going his and her own 
way, the teacher and the taught, all made 
better by what the}^ had seen and heard. 

Generally, upon coming out of the school, 
the parson's horse might be found quietly 
grazing on the meeting-house green. He 
was an uneasy creature, always trying, when 
hitched, to slip oft' his blinders, and chewing 
away at his post. Spike, the blacksmith, dc- 



126 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

dared he was the hardest horse to keep in 
shoes he ever knew. Betsy said he was lame 
in one shoulder and blind of an eye. He 
had, to be sure, so many unusual qualities that 
the village children stood quite in awe of him. 
He was, however, a most harmless beast, which 
pastured by the roadside, and, being of a light 
gray, loomed up in a weird way on dark 
nights, ^ext to the great rock in the edge of 
Lathem's wood he made the best ghost in 
town, and boys and girls were in the habit of 
saying, when at night a gray object thrust 
itself out of shadow upon their sight, — 
" Pooh ! it's only the parson's horse." 



CHAPTER XII. 

ONE GALA-DAY. 

I AM at a loss how to do justice to Mrs. 
Meeker, for, with her trained mind, her pure 
heart, and her fine manners, the parson's earn- 
est wife seemed to me quite a perfect~\voman. 
She was not handsome, but the viUage chil- 
dren were much in awe of her looks. I never 
knew a woman with a more stately expression 
than hers. When I read of Eoman matrons 
I always think of ^Irs. Meeker. Her features 
were marked and her eyes of deepest blue. 
She wore her hair combed closely down over 
her ears, so that her forehead seemed to run 
up in a point high upon her head. Its color 
was of reddish-brown, and, I am sorry to say, 
so far as it was seen, it was not her own. It 
was called a scratch, and Betsy said Mrs. 
Meeker " would look enous-h sio-ht better if 
she would leave it off." AYlietber any hair at 
all grew upon Mrs. Meeker's head was a great 
problem with the village children, and nothing 
could better illustrate the dignity of this 

127 



128 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

woman than the fact that for more than thirty 
years a whole neighborhood tried in vain to 
find out. 

She was rarely well educated for those times, 
and her language, though somewhat stiff, was 
always choice. Her voice was peculiar, a little 
cold perhaps, like her eyes, but agreeable. 
When she began to speak, it was with a sort 
of hitch like a slight cough, which I have 
known young people to copy. She came into 
church late with the parson and sat in a pew 
which faced most of the congregation. She 
was almost as motionless through the sermon 
as if made of stone, and her eyes fell upon 
uneasy children like an ice-bath. 

She taught a little school in winter. It was 
held in an upper chamber of the parson's 
house, where six tables were ranged around 
the wall, with twice as many chairs before 
them. Her scholars were chosen from well- 
to-do families, and were flattered by being 
thought worthy of companionship with the 
parson's children. Sometimes the parson him- 
self helped her at her task, and, with all due 
respect to his memory, I must say that she was 
the better teacher of the two. She gave lec- 
tures almost every day upon behavior, which 
made the atmosphere of the school a little 
bracing. Her advice would have sounded 



ONE GALA-DAY. 129 



well if written in a Look, but some of it was 
hard to be followed by lively country children. 
The consequence was that her scholars came 
to have two sets of manners, one set pecu- 
liar to themselves, the other suited to Mrs. 
Sleeker. Her own deportment was the best 
of its kind. Even her scratch became it. She 
was exacting of courtesy and her stateliness 
never forsook her. She was so cramped by 
circumstance that her lot was somewhat of a 
missionary one. Her nature was so exalted 
that it left its indelible imprint upon a Avhole 
generation in Whitefield. 

I have ni}^ liveliest recollection of Mrs. 
Meeker as she looked marching in a proces- 
sion one Fourth of July, to a grove just out- 
side of the village ; a day past more than forty 
years, but come down through the memory of 
its older inhabitants. In Lathem's pasture, 
just outside his wood, was a grove of sugar- 
maples, much honeycombed by tapping. Here 
the day was to be celebrated. For a week 
previous the weather was the chief subject of 
talk in the village. It rained the day before 
the Fourth, and all through its weary hours 
Whitefield Corner children watched the clouds 
in the sky. Just at sunset these began to lift 
from the crown of Red Mountain, and all at 
once the sun came out and went down Avith 



130 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

promise of a fair day on tlie morrow. The 
little children all came runnins; out from their 
houses like bees from a hive, so glad were they 
that the sun had " set clear." 

A long table beneath the maple-trees was 
covered with a white cloth bordered by oak- 
leaves deftly woven. Young men and maid- 
ens brought evergreens and flowers, and the 
spot blossomed like a garden. Dishes were 
lent by the village women. ^N'o art of cook- 
ery was left untried. Tarts and doughnuts 
and cakes of all kinds were heaped alongside 
chickens and cold meats. Under a tree, in a 
wagon, was a washtub, drawn thither by the 
calico-horse, who, tied to a stake, quietly 
munched the grass under his nose. This tub 
was full of lemonade, which Betsy was to 
deal out to thirsty youngsters with a long- 
handled dipper. 

The three storekeepers had sent sweetmeats 
from the stale contents of brass-mouthed jars 
— sticks of candy, red and white hearts, and 
striped " Gibraltars" (whence this name ?). 

It was an enticing spot, with its massive old 
maples, its outlying fringe of woods, the far- 
off mountains, the near village, its quiet, its 
sunshine, and its accidental, quaint garnishing. 

The people first came together in the meet- 
ing-house; the parson, the doctor, and the 



ONE GALA-DAY. 131 



two lawyers, witli tlicir wives, and tlie other 
citizens, all in best attire. The girls were 
mostly in white, with Line ribbon aronnd 
their necks, and all the boys had been sheared 
for the occasion. 

The parson made a long prayer, and then 
the procession formed, the villagers falling into 
appropriate position according to age and that 
fine instinct of precedence peculiar to country- 
people. The smaller children went first, and 
at the head of all the women marched Mrs. 
Meeker. She wore a crimson shawl that day 
(I remember it distinctly), and her two little 
boys blue jackets with bright buttons. They 
looked very fine to me — she with her stately 
manner, and all three with their gay raiment. 
The procession marched through the village to 
music of drum and fife, kept straight by a 
proud-looking marshal with a red sash around 
his waist and a badge on his collar. Little 
Benny lay very ill in a darkened room that 
day. When the villagers passed by his win- 
dow the music was stopped, but nobody 
thought he was going to die. Looking back- 
wards, liow many people find that in some of 
their lightest moments they have walked 
abreast of an unrevealed tragedy ! 

It was a pretty sight : the entire population 
of the village turned out for a holiday — a holi- 



132 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

day not foolish, but, instead, a rational and re- 
freshing break into the sameness of a qniet 
living. As a picture seen through the perspec- 
tive of forty years it is delightful. The bare- 
headed girls looked very sweet with their 
white dresses and blue ribbons, and most of 
the boys were sprucerthan they had ever been 
before. When the line turned through the 
gap which had been made in the wall into 
Lathem's pasture, bringing the great men of 
the day into full view, it would have been hard 
for many of the marchers behind them to be- 
lieve that there could be a grander occasion 
than the small pageant of that summer's day. 
At the gap the marshal stopped (how splen- 
did he looked !), and waved his baton over the 
children's heads, who filed in and sat down in 
front of the table, with their fothers and 
mothers behind them. The musicians and 
orators had seats at the head of the table upon 
a platform built under a tree. With them sat 
two aged pensioners, survivors of the Revolu- 
tion. The oration was by the town's best 
law^yer, and the " Declaration" was read by a 
loud-voiced young man with so much empha- 
sis and gesture that Farmer Lathem said it 
was the " eloquentest speech" he had ever 
heard in his life. He thought " a fellow able 
to talk like that ought to be made gove'nor." 



ONE GALA-DAY. 133 



After grace from the parson the cliilclren's 
turn came. IIow hungry they were ! Betsy 
said it " beat all natur' " to see the " critters 
cat." She knew they had fasted for a week. 

When the repast had ended, matrons as- 
sorted tlieir dishes, young men and maidens 
loitered in Lathem's wood, and little children 
frolicked about at will. It was a peaceful, 
profitable day. For a few short hours rest 
had joined hands with labor, and such finer 
instincts as were encrusted by a life of toil liad 
come out to meet the sunshine of a holiday. 
I think the fathers and mothers were as sorry 
as their children to have it end, for they looked 
surprised when the marshal with beating of 
drum summoned the loiterers back from Lath- 
em's woods. 

How vividly the scene comes back to me ! — 
the woods ringing with laughter, the white 
frocks of the girls set off by its verdure ; men, 
unused to rest, lounging upon the pasture- 
knolls; serious matrons, unbending to the 
mood of the day; the old pensioners, on their 
high perch, crowned with maple leaves; the 
parson and the orators amused, but with a 
certain dignity to maintain, — over and around 
all the unclouded brightness of a summer's 
day. I remember how the stage, when it went 
by, stopped in the road, while its passengers 



134 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

liurralied ut us, and all other travellers curi- 
ously eyed us. Quaint, homely picture, but 
heartsome and painted indelibly upon Lath- 
em's pasture. 

I think the ending of the day was the sweet- 
est part of it. It was touched with that sad- 
ness which always marks the Inpse of a happy 
To-day into a remembrance called Yesterday. 
People were slow to start, and the old pen- 
sioners seemed rooted to their seats. AVhen at 
last the procession re-formed, the drum and 
bugle Avere silent, but every man, woman, and 
child chose the companions they liked best; 
and, by pairs, slowly marched towards the vil- 
lage. At the gap in the wall the marshal again 
waved his baton, and they separated into two 
lines, through which the pensioners passed. The 
old men, tired by the day's festivities, stared 
about them with half vacant ej'es. They were 
driven in an open chariot, and I dare say that 
never in their whole lives had they been so 
royally cared for. 

When the procession marched from the 
maple grove the sun was two hours high in 
the west. People loitered outside their doors, 
and talked over the day's incidents ^vith each 
other, dreading to let go their hold upon such 
harmless diversions. A few little boys strag- 
gled back to the grove, where women were 



ONE GALA-DAY. 135 



taking away the remnants of the feast. Tlie 
tables and stage were already being demolislied, 
and the innocent show, which, while it lasted, 
was graced by, and gave grace to, the land- 
scape had already become a thing of the past. 
The actors in it, at approach of dusk, were 
absorbed into their homes ; and then, for a 
little, there was left of that gala-day a faint, 
purple glow on the edge of the horizon. Its 
brightness, however, had not died out of peo- 
ple's hearts. The little girls packed away their 
white frocks and blue ribbons, the men and 
women went back to their tasks, but some- 
thing immortal had gone into their lives — the 
glory of one care-free and joyful day. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



BOWDY-PLACE. 



±)0Wdy-Place was so called from an old 
house built by a man named Bowdj. It is 
surprising liow long a deserted house will cling 
to a landscape in the country. This one had 
been doorless and windowless for years, and 
it was the delight of children, who prowled 
about it fearless of the ghosts which did really 
dwell in it. All houses in which people have 
lived are full of ghosts. These are the noise- 
less, busy memories of past days, which make 
the dead live, the dumb speak, and formless 
and faded things take shape and color. Every 
aspect of a decaying house in the country is 
beautiful. When it has begun to totter, with 
slanting sides and sunken roof, I^ature by de- 
grees absorbs it; so that what we call "rot" 
is only the melting awa^' of the skeleton of a 
home into the bosom of the earth. 

The grave of an old house always makes me 
sad. You can never mistake one, — a hollow in 
a field or pasture, full of berry-bushes and lush 

13G 



BOWDY-PLACE. 137 



weeds, the soil red Avith crumbled bricks, a 
few ragged apple-trees near by, and, perhaps, 
a well full of rocks. So Ions: as such sio-ns re- 
main no house can be said to have been wholly 
hewed or burned or rotted down. Something 
from it has stayed behind, something stronger 
than frame-work or finishing. Until some 
thrifty farmer, then, shall fill up and plough 
over the cellar of Bowdy house, the field in 
which it is must bear the name of Bowdy- 
Place. 

In my day this field was famous for its wild 
strawberries. The Whitefield children used to 
say that they \vere to be found there " as big 
as thimbles." Did you ever go after wild 
strawberries ? If you never have, start straight 
for the low-lying meadows, yellow with butter- 
cups. They are not to be found in fields, full 
of stout herds-grass and grain. Tlie straw- 
berry is shy, and hides away in rock-heaps 
and along walls. It loves old things and takes 
root in unused fields and pastures. It has a 
savage streak, and plants itself about jagged 
stumps in " burnt" and newly-broken ground, 
where it grows tall with a strong, red stem ; 
and, because it gets the first fat of the soil, 
bears sweet, well-rounded fruit. In patches of 
spindling grass it throws up long stalks, Avith 
a juicy berry, Avhich hangs over like a head 
10 



138 OLDTIME CHILDLJFE. 

too big for its body. Sweetest strawberries 
are, however, to be found in fields of short, 
seldom-uprooted grass, where the plant crawls 
about rocks and clings to the earth with pale- 
red tendrils. Here the berries shrink in size, 
but delight the eater by their flavor. Indeed, 
there are so many kinds that I despair, without 
leading you by the hand, of making a first-class 
strawberry-hunter of you. I w^ould not go after 
strawberries in the middle of the day, for they 
are so enticing you are apt at that time to heat 
your blood. If, when you stoop for them, some- 
thing begins to rush with a thump into your 
head, and your eyes mix the vines with the 
grass, kno^v then that it is time to w^et your tem- 
ples with spring w^ater and lie down under the 
shade of a tree. But, whatever happens to 
you, hold on to your berries, for, -svhen you have 
cooled off, you will be sorry to have lost them. 

Bowdy-Place lies between two little ponds 
a mile and a half perhaps from each. These 
two ponds, one in the Saunders Neighborhood, 
and the other to the east, called Blue Pond, 
are like two eyes in the landscape. Set with 
trees, they glitter like jewels. Safibrd's brook 
empties into Blue Pond, which, seen from a 
"Whitefield Corner window, seems to be lying 
on the top of a forest. 

The land of Whitefield is called " springy" ; 



nOWDY-PLACE. 139 



and its overplus of water takes shape in brooks 
and meadow-land. The brooks which thread 
its fields and pastures are full of trout, and its 
meadows are bright and beautiful. The one 
between the village and Blue Pond overflows 
in spring ; at which time SafFord's brook be- 
comes a savage rover. Then men and boys 
fish by night for smelts and barbels, and make 
a wild scene with their torches and bonfires. 
If you have never seen them, you can have no 
idea how weird they look, flitting about half 
revealed in the darkness. The barbels, caught 
with spears, are full of tiny bones, and are* of 
little worth ; but the smelts, dredged with meal 
and fried crisp, are so delicious" that I recall 
their taste though unrcpeated for many years. 
There was no brook on Bowdy-Place, but a 
soggy spot in one corner of the field, where 
grew tall ferns, the spicy odor of which was 
carried by the wind to young strawberry-pick- 
ers, who used to cover their berries with 
them. Whitefield children always called them 
brakes, and I like this name better than ferns 
for such strong-scented, thick-ribbed leaves 
as sprung from the wet land of the town. 

Bowdy-Place was neglected and shaggy, full 
of rock-heaps and bushes. The Avay tTit'was 
delightful. It was a farm-path, running under 
the shadow of trees alongside walls. You had 



140 OLD TIME CIIILDLIFE, 

to let down several pairs of bars to get to it, 
unless you chose to search for a gap in a wall. 
I never knew but one path pleasanter than this 
one, and that was the lane which led to my 
grandfather's house. That lane was unsur- 
passed for its coolness and verdure; the farm- 
j)ath for the affluent outgrow^th of its walls. I 
wish I could paint for you, just as I see it, this 
line of wall to Bowdy-Place, covered tliick 
with vines and bushes. It Avas a beautiful 
natural hedge. 

A long-past morning spent at the place with 
little Benny comes back to me most vividly, 
because of an incident and an after-experience. 
We had filled our pails with berries and had 
started for the fern-bed, when a snake, by coil- 
ing around Benny's leg, gave us such a fright 
that w^e flung our pails behind us and ran for 
the next field, where we loitered, wishing, yet 
afraid, to go back. Farmer Lathem spied us 
and offered to take us home on a load of hay. 
There Avas a saying in Whitefield that if any- 
body could " get work out of lazy-bones," that 
person was Farmer Lathem, and the White- 
field young men declared tliat it was not safe 
to go near him in haying-time. 

Benny and I liad heard of this, but the old 
farmer looked pleasantly over the top of the 
wall, and when w^e told him about the snake 



li WD Y-PLA CE. 141 



he shook liis head and said we must never 
think of going back after the pails ; that a 
dozen of them were not worth the risk of a 
snake-bite. So we let him help us over and 
put us into a rack, when he turned at once to 
his man and said, " ISTow we have caught the 
young rascals, we'll make them tread down 
our hay. Red Mountain has a storm-cap on. 
A shower's coming up, and a heavy one at 
that. Roll and pitch as fast as you can." 

The farmer kept telling us that " treading 
down" was the best kind of play, but we 
thought it was hard work. His Sue and Judy 
were treading down a load on the other side 
of the field, but they were used to it and their 
laughter was pleasant to hear. A snake was 
tossed up with their hay. They did not mind 
it, although Benny said it made him " crawl 
all over." 

The winrows were tumbled into heaps, and 
the heaps were cast on the load. The goaded 
oxen ran about the field. I had not thought 
they could go so fast. They tossed us in and 
out of the hollows and flung the cart about 
like a plaything. The hay kept slipping this 
way and that, and it was piled so high above 
the rack that the farmer charged us to keep 
in the middle of the load. 

Meanwhile streamers of dried grass began 



142 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

to cut loose and fly wildly about. It grew 
dark ; scurrying drops fell hither and thither. 
The farmer told his man to stop, and said it 
was " of no use ; the unpitched hay must get 
wet in the field." Then, buried neck-deep in 
the sweet-smelling load, we were jolted over 
the sill of the barn, and, with Sue and Judy, 
we made its rafters ring with our shouts. 
Benny and I never quite knew how we got 
down to the floor, but the farmer told us we 
'' acted as if we were as brittle as glass." He 
said the load would have to " stand over till 
morning," and that we must stay in the barn 
until it cleared. 

We stood in the doorway, Judy and Sue 
and Benny and I, and without speaking stared 
at the storm. It poured and poured and 
poured, until water ran in torrents down the 
road. The forked lightning filled the sky and 
we were almost stunned by the thunder. We 
were afraid and wished that the farmer and 
his men, who were tending their cattle, would 
come to the door. One flash set the field 
aflame. With it came such a crash that we 
thought the barn had been struck and hid our 
faces in our hands. But it was an oak in a 
corner of the field, under which our load had 
a little before loitered. Its branches were 
stripped and a seam was ploughed through its 



BOWDY-PLACE. 143 



trunk. Benny c^nd I began to cry. Judy and 
Sue pointed their fingers at us and laughed, 
calling us "two scared little fools." The 
farmer left his cattle and told the girls to stop. 
lie said the " worst of it" was over, but that 
the hay out in the field was quite spoiled. 

Just then there was a rift in a cloud, show- 
ing a streak of blue. Suddenly the sky was 
aglow with splendor. You know, my child, 
what came to pass after that fierce shower, — 
how the gilded mist went flying hither and 
thither at the breaking out of the sun ; how 
the water dried up as fast as it came ; and 
everything that had been cast down and be- 
draggled seemed to jump up with a bound; 
how the air was heavy with scent washed out 
from grass and clover, and the creatures, 
which had gone in from the rain, came out 
again to view. Even the old farmer grew 
hopeful in the sunshine, and said that, after 
all, the hay left out was only " the scrapings of 
the field." 



CHAPTER XIV. 

WHITEFIELD ACADEMY. 

" The Spring Term of this Institution will commence 
on Monday, the 24th day of February instant, under the 
instruction of Mr. John G-. Leeks, whose reputation as a 
teacher is too well known to need any eulogium. 

" Tuition, twenty-five cents per week. Board can be 
had in respectable families for one dollar and fifty cents 
per week. 

*' "William Saylor, Jr., Secretary. 

"Feb. 11, 1840." 

This advertisement is copied, word for word, 
from a paper called the Dexter Enquirer, which 
passed through the mail from Dexter to White- 
field Corner just forty years ago. It was writ- 
ten by William Saylor himself, secretary of a 
board of trustees in Whitefield Corner, and 
also the storekeeper who sold paregoric to the 
sick man's brother from Boston. 

The academy Avas kept in a room over the 
meeting-house, which was built two stories 
high, as its deed says, " for educational pur- 
poses." It was a large, sunny room, with six 
many-paned windows, four to the south and 

144 



WniTEFIELD ACADEMY. 145 

two to the east. The view from it was delight- 
ful, and the scholars in it w^ere trained as much 
to a love of Mature as of study. When I first 
went into the academy-room it had a look of 
hard usage. Boys had brought to it from the 
district-school a habit of Avhittling and fresco- 
ing, and the dust of past years had been rubbed 
into seats and desk-lids. I liked it better, 
however, then, than I did after it had been 
painted a pea-green, and its walls covered with 
a pea-green and white paper. ^N'o matter what 
you did to the room, though, you could not 
spoil it, for it was always the same sunny, 
sightly spot, where young boys and girls sat 
face to face with ^N'ature. 

I recall Mr. Leeks, my first teacher, exactly. 
He was a pale, thin, hard-working man, of 
average ability. There was a Mrs. Leeks, 
mother of Joseph Leeks, of tender years, a 
boy who made me think of celery. They 
all three had a bleached look ; and I remem- 
ber that the Whitefield women objected to 
the length of Mrs. Leeks's neck. She taught 
classes in French ; and I have since learned 
that her accent was by no means pure. They 
only stayed nine months. 

The school seldom had more than a spring 
and a fall term of three months each, and w^as 
taught mostly by fresh graduates from near 



146 OLDTIME GHILDLIFE. 

colleges. As a rule the instruction was of a 
high order ; for it was the custom to send word 
to any candidate for the place that it was of no 
use for persons without brains to try to teach 
in Whiteiield. The school was always full ; 
for, besides the village boys and girls, scholars 
walked from the Saunders Neighborhood, from 
Cokes and Does Corners, and from the town 
of Boxford. The girls from Boxford were all 
pretty blondes and were tasteful in their dress. 
Those from Cokes Corner were inclined to be 
" swarthy," but were excellent scholars. All 
of them had a pleasant habit of bringing into 
the room wild-flowers from the wayside. Some 
girls " boarded themselves" ; that is, they hired 
chambers in village houses, and brought with 
them cooked food enouo'h to last a week, and 
were allowed some use of kitchen stoves. I 
remember what a hopeless longing I had to try 
this style of housekeeping. Boarders from a 
distance, at a dollar and a half a week, were 
not many. 

The Boxford boys were stalwart and good- 
looking, but w^ere thought to be conceited by 
the Whitefield young people. If you ask after 
any of them now, you will be told that they 
were " smart" and " turned out well." They 
had loud voices and were good readers. On 
" declamation-day" they roared like young 



WHITEFIELD ACADEMY. 147 

lions. This came every Wednesday afternoon, 
when parents were *' respectfully^ invited to 
attend." A stage ran along, under the east 
windows at right angles to the school-room 
seats, and spectators sat opposite to it. 

What has become of all those eloquent acad- 
emy boys ? Who could have believed that the 
splendid, dark-eyed, plumed "Gomez," who 
dragged in the "old Peruvian," would settle 
down into a plain country doctor, or that 
" Marc Antony" would be content to sell shoes ? 
Who could have imairined that the roll of their 
recited rhvmcs, which went strais^ht to one's 
head and heart, was all mock thunder ? 

" At midnight, in his guarded tent, 
The Turk was dreaming of the hour," — 

But why repeat? You know them all, — the 
standard " pieces" of those days. The " poor" 
speakers were greatly pitied. One boy had 
but two pieces, which he spoke alternately. 
One of them was the " Burial of Sir John 
Moore." He had a way of shifting his feet and 
working his fingers when he declaimed, as if 
he had been wound up with a crank, which 
made the girls titter. Teachers used to say 
that it was of no use trying to make an orator 
of Leander ; but his mother insisted that as 
long as he had " any kind of a voice" there 



148 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

was hope. Pieces were chosen with taste, and 
from their much repeating, were accurately 
learned by all the academy hoys and girls. 
Grood literature was also found by them in 
their reading-hooks, from which they read 
standing up in their seats until told to sit down 
by the teacher. This was done under a fire 
of criticism, and the "selections" were truly 
drilled into memory. I remember, wdien quite 
a small child, being called upon to read with 
a loud-spoken young man from Boxford, and 
w^hen I called, in a piping voice, " Armed say 
you ?" he shouted back, "Armed, my lord !" 
with such stage-effect that I lost my place in 
my book. On the upper shelf of a closet, in 
a house at Whitefield Corner, may be found 
samples of most of the readers used in ancient 
schools. They are full of good things; and 
their kind had much to do with educating the 
children of the past. Even " Webster's Spell- 
ing-Book," with the story at its end of the 
foolish rabbits, has touched the hearts of many 
old-fashioned children. Most grown people 
can recall how they pored over the "illustra- 
tions" of their school-books, and nothing comes 
back to a time-marred memorj^ with greater 
relish and readiness than the rhymes and 
homilies once learned from them. I used to 
love the pages of " AVebster's Spelling-Book," 



WFIITEFIELD ACADEMY. 149 

headed here and there with a pictured fahlc, — 
soLace of laggard school hours. I find myself 
wondering if the children of to-day are able to 
pick such crumbs of comfort and delight out 
of their books, as were freely scattered through 
the driest of the musty volumes packed away 
on that upper shelf at AYhitefield Corner. 
The reading-book I liked the least was the 
" Historical," — a volume which began with an 
account of the Creation and ended with an 
address to Deity, in blank verse ; its lightest 
illustrations being the Pyramids and the Tower 
of Babel. Yet from this, the driest of them, 
much was learned. Even a modest little book 
under my hand, having on its title-page, — 
^' The Easy Eeader, — Designed to be used 
next in course, after the Spelling-Book, in 
schools and families ; published in Boston, in 
1828, by John Frost," — has great merit. Most 
of its pieces are from Mrs. Hemans, Jane 
Taylor, and Mrs. Barbauld, — tender extracts, 
fitted to please and leave a moral flavor behind. 
I open, at random, to the Hour of Prayer, — 
learned, word for word, by most of the children 
who used the book. I am glad that forty years 
passed before I found that the little girl, kneel- 
ing in front of a rose-bush at the top of the 
page, as well as all its other pictures, was a 
miserable wood-cut. 



150 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

The boys sat on one side and the girls on 
the other, in the academy at Whitefield Corner. 
They were all in dead earnest. Most of them 
worked with their hands before and after 
school ; many walked far ; and all tried to get 
the utmost out of their short tuition. There 
was more or less rivalry between the boys and 
girls; the former not liking to be outdone by 
the latter. A blackboard, nailed to the wall 
opposite to the stage, was the occasion of many 
class-contests between them. In compositions 
the girls were far ahead. One boy in particular, 
Avho wrote of " spring" and lambs "gambling" 
on the hillsides, never heard the last of gamb- 
ling spring lambs. 

The Ml term wound up with an exhibition 
on a stage, built in front of the meeting- 
house pulpit, on which ^' Gomez" and " Pi- 
zarro" and " Marc Antony," in the glory of 
feathers and swords, awed the plainer people, 
from the outlying farms of Whitefield, who 
took these loud-voiced academy boys for real 
orators. Teachers always offered to excuse 
Leander from the exhibition ; but his mother 
made him speak one of his two pieces, because, 
she said, it would help him " wear off" his bash- 
fulness." The stage-curtain seldom worked 
well ; but when it " stuck" it could always be 
pulled backwards and forwards by little boys. 



WIIITEFIELD ACADEMY. 151 

One of the lawyers never failed to suo:2:cst tliat 
the meeting-house floor was overloaded, which 
had no other effect than to make some of the 
women wdiisper that they wished " he would 
hold his tongue." 

How lono' asro all this seems ! The White- 
field boys, who fitted for college and declaimed 
in the pea-green room, now " along in years," 
are scattered far and wide. Some of them are 
dead. The room itself, I am told, is intact 
though time-worn. It is tied to the meeting- 
house by a deed. Let it stand, the ghostly old 
room, open, as ever, to one of the rarest of 
landscapes ! Schools may be kept in it yet ; 
but it can never hold more eager scholars, or 
more earnest teachers, than they of forty years 
ago. If you happen to meet anywhere one of 
those ancient stage actors, call out, — "How 
now, Gomez? Whither goest thou?" and 
you will be answered back : " On yonder hill, 
amongst the palm-trees, w^e have surprised an 
old Peruvian. Escape by flight he could not, 
and we seized him unresisting." 



CHAPTER XY. 



THANKSGIVING DINNERS. 



Faiimer Lathem used to say that the weather 
was '' set in its ways," and tliat the ground 
always "shut up" about Thanksgiving-time. 
All northern country-livers know what that 
shutting up means. Jack Frost flirts weeks 
beforehand in and out shady corners, while 
the splendor of field and forest deludes no one 
by its hectic outburst of coloring. To-day's 
sunshine melts the rime of the past night ; but 
it is in nowise to be depended upon. In vain 
the housewife blankets her flower-beds. To- 
morrow she wakes up to find only little heart- 
shaped bare spots in the corners of her win- 
dow-panes, through which she looks out upon 
a frozen landscape. Every leaf is gangrened, 
and every twig is as positive as an exclamation- 
point : " The ground has shut up !" 

Then follows that newborn indoor-life which, 
if well regulated, is like a smooth-flowing pas- 
toral, with here and there a quickening of its 
rhythm. In the first autumnal freedom of this 

152 



THANKSGIVING DINNERS. 153 

life from care, is offered up that tlianksgiving 
wliieli has become a part of the history of IS'ew 
Eng'land. In early times the religious fervor of 
Thanksgiving-Day was far greater than now. 
"When the gathered fruits of the earth poured 
into store-rooms and cellars, the hearts of 
simple ancient workers poured out in grateful 
worship. With lapse of years family ties 
broadened, substance waxed fat, and by de- 
grees the thanksgiving, preceded by much 
slaughter, became, what an old Puritan would 
have looked upon as a half-heathen rite. With 
all due deference, however, to the sweet piety 
with which these same Puritans observed it, I 
must confess that it is the flavor of smoking 
fleshpots — not that of strong sermons — which 
has come down to me from my childhood 
Thanksgivings. 

Kext to the religious aspect of this day, its 
best essence has always been its hospitality. 
It is the home-rallying point of disintegrated 
families, — ^the altar from which the incense of 
affection goes up with that of baked meats, 
and kindleth anew from its 3^early gathering 
of forces. " Going home to Thanksgiving" 
is the watchword of many old New Eng- 
land families ; and with them, for that day at 
least, the current of love flows backward to 
the fathers and mothers and the dear old 
n 



154 OLDTLME CHILDLTFE. 

grandparents, who sit waiting by ancestral 
hearths. 

Were the Thanksgiving dinners of forty years 
ago better than the Thanksgiving dinners of 
to-day ? "Were they better than any dinners 
of to-day ? or are they relished by the piquant 
sauces of indulgent memory? I think the 
dinners were in every way better, — better in 
material, in make-up, in baking, and in serv- 
ing. The sweet, firm fibre of their flesh and 
fowl had been fed upon sun-ripened grain and 
fruits. Their toothsome condiments and mix- 
tures were the work of the skilled housewife, 
who, wlien her viands were ready, had a brick 
oven to cook and brown them in as she willed. 

For skill of engineering what could surpass 
one of these dinners, built up by a great deal of 
work done on a side-track ? In W^iitefield Cor- 
ner children helped chop the mince-meat, and, 
under sharp maternal eye, stoned, the raisins. 
The oven quietly swallowed up and as quietly 
disgorged. Save by unusually sweet odors much 
of the previous preparation hardly betrayed it- 
self. But on Thanksgiving-Day, what hidden 
secrets of pantry and closet were revealed ! 
The dinner — ^in reality the condensed result of 
many days of intelligent, persistent labor — 
passed smoking hot from the oven to the table ; 
gravies and sauces glided in by side-doors ; 



TIIANKSGIVIXO DINNERS. 155 

pickles took their places, and the oldtimc hoy 
Avas as deaf to the grace as he had heen to the 
previous sermon. He foolishly gave no heed 
to the dear mother's often-repeated suggestion 
that the dinner had just hegun. He ate freely 
of turkey and stuffing and side-dishes, and only 
slighted the chicken-pie hecause of a squahhlc 
over a wish-hone which, undried, refused to 
break. The pudding proved to he what was 
called '' filling" ; and I do not believe that 
a middle-aged, country-born In^cw Englander 
lives who does not recall the exquisite pang 
with which, in childhood, a semi-circle of 
Thanksgiving pie was sometimes left upon the 
plate. A small girl, or boy, was seldom un- 
equal to an after-dash at raisins and nuts, and 
never can die out of memory that supreme air 
of contentment which used, from the dear old 
grandmother down to the youngest child, to 
settle upon a family after it had partaken of a 
Thanks2:ivino^ dinner. 

Thankfulness took the form of rest. The old 
people dozed, careful householder and busy 
matron let go the reins of care, and children 
dreamily floated through the afternoon hours of 
this memorial day. Nature herself seemed to 
abet their mood, and to mellow the atmosphere 
both indoors and out. The happy season was 
lengthened by withholding of candles, and the 



15G OLDTTME CHILDLIFE. 

brightness of sunset filled the room like a bene- 
diction. 

Better still, the beantiful aftergloAv of inno- 
cent social life, of which the grandfather and 
grandmother were the centre, when nuts and 
apples were brought in and talk pleasantly took 
the form of reminiscence. 

Best of all, that sweet and tender parting, 
when, in the later evening, the dear old folks 
sped the little ones with their blessing, and, 
crowned by the ruddy firelight, foreshadowed 
to these, their loitering young lovers, their 
own coming glory. 

When I say that the material of the oldtime 
country Thanksgiving dinner was better than 
that of a like dinner of to-day, I know where- 
of I afiirm. So much in my childhood did the 
best yearly products of the earth converge into 
Thanksgiving-Day that it became to country 
boys a sort of fetich, to which objects were 
dedicated long beforehand with the prefix of 
Thanksgiving. Every thrifty home had its 
Thanksgiving turkey and pullets and pig set 
aside for careful tending, at the slaughter of 
which the young barbarians were always ready 
to lend a helping hand. They had their own 
especial wild-forage ofierings, such as sweet 
flag and nuts. They loved the previous mys- 
teries and bustle of the day, and the Avonder is 



THANKSGIVING DINNERS. 157 

that out of so mucli carnal eutansclemont of it 
tliey could carry into mature life, as they did, 
its pure, vivifying sentiment of heav^enly wor- 
ship and family love. 

Close upon it, Whitefield farmers used to 
prowl, lantern in hand, in and out barns and 
sheds, after unwary fowl, whose fatness had 
marked them weeks beforehand for the sacri- 
Hcial knife. What tid])its went, day by day, 
into the rounding-out of such Thanksgiving 
turkeys, geese, and pullets as made gourmands 
out of the eaters of them ! How clean and 
innocent looked the inevitable, disembowelled 
pig, which, with its flakes of white fat, hung, 
at the right season, before almost every flirm- 
er's door ! The roast of this pig known, Avhen 
served at a Thanksgiving dinner, as sparerib, 
had been fattened upon buttermilk and corn- 
meal. Its best relish could be gotten by taking 
it on the sly, rib by rib, between thumb and fin- 
ger, and dexterously sucking its inmost juices. 
Sweeter meat than that next its bone is no- 
where to be found. As my grandmother used 
to say of the crust of her johnny-cakes, into 
every fibre of it seemed to have gone the 
golden glory of the corn. 

I am just as positive about the cooking as I 
am about the material of the dinners. Tlie 
relish of the oldtime mince-pies has quite 



158 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

passed into tradition, — those pies upon which 
our stalwart ancestors throve, and with which 
the}' regaled their guests. They have been de- 
cried because they have been misunderstood. 
They were the product of the skilled labor of 
the housewife, not the experiment of the hand- 
maiden. Hence they have to be largely a thing 
of the past. Baked in brick ovens they were 
no more like the thin, stove-dried, dyspepsia- 
giving abortions sold in shops, than the Thanks- 
giving pig fed by a farmer's wife upon milk 
and meal, is like the poisonous swine driven 
through city streets. 

An impression, in some localities, seems to 
prevail that IN'ew England people have been, 
and still are, largely fed upon pies. The diet 
has also been strongly condemned as unhealth- 
ful. It may be so ; still, with my own recol- 
lections of them, I should be in a state of daily 
thanksgiving if there could as often appear 
upon my table one of my grandmother's deli- 
cious pies. 

A true Thanksgiving mince-pie should be 
an inch thick, with a thin, flaky crust, tinted 
by its imprisoned juices, which threaten to 
break through like blood from overfall veins. 
Around its edge must be a slight crinkle made 
by the tines of a fork or castor-bottle cover; 
and in its top a hole here and there from the 



THANKSGIVING DINNERS. 159 



Stroke of a knife to let the steam out. This 
steam, once known, can never be forgotten, — 
the intermingled exhalation of beef and pork 
or suet, and apples and raisins and citron and 
sugar and spices and boiled cider, and, in pro- 
fane families, of a dash of good brandy. When 
you press upon its upper crust, there should 
gush up from the slashes a brown grayy, spark- 
ling with tiny globules of fat, and deliciously 
scenting the room. Fortunate they who have 
been permitted to relish, with a slice of cream- 
cheese, and a mug of sweet cider, this health- 
ful, bliss-giving pie ! 

How, as I talk about such common things, 
the fashioners of them come back to me ! It 
is like opening the door to a gallery of old por- 
traits, from out whose dim perspective wrinkled 
hands beckon to me ; and, because I will it, 
lead me to oldtime thanksgiving altars, — al- 
tars before w^hich ministered simple-hearted, 
unveneered, godly people, and whose smoking 
incense has been filtered by time into a fragrant 
memory. Indeed, the glory of Thanksgiving- 
Day is that heart, that core of it, wdiich under- 
lies all outer crust of worldliness. It is born 
of, and takes hold utterly, of family-life. Hence 
one is miserly of such customs of it, be they 
ever so homely, as pleasantly link him or her 
with the [tast. 



160 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

A little more than forty years ago I went, late 
one afternoon, with my grandmother, to visit 
Mrs. Merrill, Avho lived at the top of Merrill's 
Hill, in the town of East Road, the woman of 
whom I borrowed the rennet. It was the day 
before Thanksgiving, and Mrs. Merrill, with 
her daughter and her sister, Avas busy making 
mince-pies. She was a plump, rosy-cheeked, 
spry little woman, — the best kind of a figure 
to put in the foreground of a genre j)icture. 
Hanging from a crane in the kitclien fire- 
place was a steaming pot full of mince-meat, 
which Mrs. Merrill stirred with a spoon and 
dipped into crusted plates, passed to her by 
her daughter, Josephine, — a tall, thin, tallowy- 
faced girl, expert at cutting off superfluous 
pie-crust by running a knife rapidly around 
the edge of a plate. Before a table stood Mrs. 
Merrill's sister, rolling out little pats of crust, 
sliced from a flaky lump into thin leaves, which 
she folded and then unfolded upon the plates 
as they shifted through Josephine's hands to 
the pot. The passes were made so quickly 
that they seemed almost like sleigh t-of-h and. 
The pies were baked in batches, and just after 
we went in the sister took one batch out of 
the oven and put in another. 

At first Mrs. Merrill proposed to go with us 
into the " foreroom," but my grandmother 



THANKSGIVING DINNERS. 161 



told her to "keep right on with lier work," 
which she seemed ghid to do, as the heat of 
her oven she said had gotten low and must be 
" brisked up with coals." 

I sat and watched and listened to these 
women. They talked much of pies and the 
mysteries of their making. Mrs. Merrill told us 
that " father" (meaning Mr. Merrill) had bought 
his raisins at West instead of East lioad ; and 
though they were a cent higher on a pound, 
they Avere not so good as those of the year 
before. Her boiled cider was also less strong 
than usual, hence she feared for the quality of 
her pies. She offered a taste of her meat to 
my grandmother, who smacked her lips, and 
told Mrs. Merrill that she must be "fishing for 
a compliment," for no better meat than hers 
ever " went into a pie." Then they all praised 
the color of it, and my grandmother handed 
the half-filled spoon over to me, which I lapped 
quite clean. 

Mrs. Merrill told us, in confidence, that she 
should have put a little " spirit" into her meat, 
had she not been afraid that it would "go 
against the grain" of her sister's husband, 
who was a minister,— one of the " called kind," 
and " a master-hand," she declared, " at a re- 
vival." One was " going on," she said, then, 
at West lload, and she could not sec what 



162 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

made her Josephine so '' stiff-necked." The 
pies were for early winter use. " Father" had 
put up a hanging-shelf for them in the garret, 
out of the way of mice, and she did hope they 
would " taste like something." 

"When it grew dark she told Josephine to 
"" light up," and the " tallow-dip" only brought 
out into sharp-cut silhouette these quaint 
workers at their homely task. The fire glowed, 
the pot sputtered, the pies were shaped and 
baked, the women prattled. Then the father 
and the preacher came in, both stalwart and 
good-natured. The crane was swung back, 
Josephine lighted up the " foreroom," and 
shortly my grandmother went home. I left 
the actual scene behind me, but thepicturesque- 
ness, the spirit of it, brought out by firelight, 
is immortal. 

Dear old workers, with your dear old ways, 
my pen lingers lovingly over you. I remember 
perfectly how, as I went out from them to the 
top of Merrill's Hill, the sharp peaks of a dis- 
tant mountain range stood out against the sky, 
which was red with the afterglow of sunset, — 
rugged yet beautiful. Just so, in the afterglow 
of life, stand out in memory such customs, 
with their experiences, as took root in the 
sources of rational enjoyment. 



CHAPTER XVI. 



I THINK, after all, that Latliem's wood was 
the best playground of the children of White- 
field. How many hours did Benny and I 
loiter reverently in the heart of this old forest 
and Avatch, through its interlocked branches, 
an immeasurable depth of sky, with its clouds 
sailing away from us, and its blue growing 
deeper and deeper ! 

Benny said it seemed as if he could see 
straight through them into heaven; that the 
solemn old wood made him sad; and once, 
while Ivinsf on one of its knolls, in the mellow 
brightness of an early autum^i day, he said he 
felt like crying ; and he did not know what 
the matter was. How many of you have had 
your hearts touched by such far-off outlook 
through the trees of an old wood ? 

Lathem's wood and pasture were full of ed- 
ible thinofs. Tliere was not a berrv to be 
found anywhere in Whitefield whicli tlicv did 
not somewhere l)riiig forth, — on kn(.)lls, along 



1G4 OLD TIME CniLDLIFE. 

walls, in corners, by rocks, or around jagged 
stumps. The boys and girls of Whitelield 
Corner got much gum from this wood, where 
it was to be found in lumps on the jagged 
bark of spruce-trees. When " clear," it slowly 
softened in the mouth, turning from amber 
color to a pale pink. It was a staple article 
of trade with schoolboys, who in winter kept 
their pockets full of it, and cliewers might be 
heard asking each other if their gum was 
" soft" or " hard," or getting " crumbly." 

If you sit down on one of the knolls of 
Lathem's wood, cushioned thick with the out- 
worn leaves of old trees, and turn over its dead 
waste, from underneath will come to light 
verdure and manifold insects. The ground 
will seem to be alive. You will also find rem- 
nants of last year's harvest : three-sided beech- 
nuts much eaten by worms, and sodden acorns, 
some of them tufted with twin leaves, the be- 
ginning of trees. In a certain hollow stump 
the year before* was a squirrel's nest fall of 
beechnuts cleanly shelled. The cunning rover 
has eaten them and gone. Late in autumn 
these nuts are to be found fresh beneath the 
beech-trees, amongst fallen leaves and in 
the crevices of black mould. They are tiny, 
but full and sweet-meated, easy upon pockets, 
and crack under the teeth with a harmless 



LATIIEM'S WOOD. 1G5 

click. Hung up in calico l)ags to dry, they 
grow richer by keeping. With patience they 
can be gathered from gradual droppings, 
though after their burrs Avere opened by frost 
the boys of Whitefield climbed the trees and 
shook them down upon sheets. The best way 
is to scramble for them to the music of crack- 
ling leaves and brushwood, when they will 
slip into hollows and under the edges of 
rocks. Whiteiield children used to store 
away red-oak acorns for winter use, and it is 
surprising how much bitterness will go out 
of these with drying. The white-oak acorn 
was much esteemed, but I always thought it 
insipid. 

A half-day's diversion in Lathem's wood 
forty years ago is as real to me as the events 
of yesterday. It seems hardly worth writing 
about that Benny and I went " brooming" 
with Betsy, had it not been Benny's last ram- 
ble outside the village of AVhitefield. In 
earlier days New England housewives made 
their brooms from freshly-broken hemlock 
branches. '' Goins: broominsc" was as much 
an item of their weekly labor as were scrub- 
bing and mending. The shaping and tying 
up of a hemlock broom into a well-rounded, 
compact mass was quite an art, and, when 
newly made, it flung a resinous odor into a 



166 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

room. By sprinkling it and standing it, when 
not in use, in tlie cool cellarway, it could be 
made to last days, and in winter " broom stuft"' 
would keep for weeks in a cellar where it had 
been stored for use. "When young prowlers 
came, in Lathem's wood, upon a spot where, 
in the trampled snow, were scattered sprigs of 
hemlock, they said, " A broomer has been 
here." The brooms, at their best, were short- 
liyed, soon shedding and easily slipping from 
their " sticks"; but they sent children into the 
beautiful Ayoods and out to meet the briirht- 
ness of the year's best days. 

Betsy broke her hemlock, and, as there was 
no need, she said, " of tugging the odds and 
ends home," she shaped and eyened her broom 
under the trees, and shook it and stamped 
upon it until it was ready to be tied on. Its 
pungent juices were let out by this bruising 
into the old wood, — unbidden incense of that 
happy day. 

ITear by, alongside a wall, was a row of 
dead young pines, with their girdled bark 
hanging. 

" What's the matter with those pines ?" 
asked Benny. 

'' Sliyered," said Betsy. 

" Slivered ?" 

''Yes, slivered. Didn't you ever eat a 



LATHEM'S WOOD. 1G7 

sliver?" Then she told us how to sliver a 
tree, and I will tell you. 

E'ever go into woods after slivers, lest you 
spoil growing timber and either get a whip- 
ping or have damages to pay. Take a sharp 
knife in spring, and when you have come to a 
young straggling pine, alongside a wall, draw 
your blade round it as far as you can reach 
from the ground. Turn down the bark, and 
inside of it, on the trunk of the tree, you will 
find a juicy, milk-white lining, which you must 
scrape off. It will ripple in ribbons, and you 
will probably have to hold your mouth to catch 
them. These are " slivers." How delicious 
they are ! The juice of them runs down your 
knife-handle, through your fingers, out of the 
corners of your mouth, tickles your palate, 
and for days afterwards stains your face and 
hands. I would not " sliver," children, for, 
after all, it gives but a transient pleasure, and 
you eat the heart of a tree, the ghost of which, 
like the dead pines of Lathem's wood, will 
make sorry any Eature-loving heart. 

After we had talked about the slivered pines 
that afternoon, I remember with the sad dis- 
tinctness of all memorial days, how we all sat 
down on the big rock at the base of which 
was the trout-pool. Into this pool foolish flies 
kept tumbling with a tiny eddy, and every 



168 OLD TIME CniLDLIFE. 

now and then something would make a splash 
ill the water. Bushes, feehle for lack of sun- 
shine, fell over the rock and trailed along with 
the current. It was such a shady, restful 
place that Benny said he would like to be a 
fish in that pool for a day. We were thirsty, 
and he thought he would dip some water from 
it with his hat. Something shot into this, — 
an arrow, a flash, a gleam of gold. Benny 
had caught a trout; and, quick as thought, 
lifting the brim of his hat above the water, 
made a net of its crown. Then he sent me to 
Dame Safford for a pail, which she was loth 
to- lend. It was the first trout he had ever 
caught, and we were proud as we carried it 
l)etween us along the road to the old dame's 
cottage. Farmer Lathem met us on the way 
and stopped and looked into the pail, with his 
scythe standing out on his shoulder. His little 
dog came along and he looked in too, poising 
himself on its edge. 

" It's a proper nice little fish," said the 
farmer. " I'd drop it down in a well, where 
'twill eat up all the bugs and worms." 

Then he went on, with his dog following 
after. I see just how he looked, with his long 
scythe, and his stooping gait, and his little dog 
trotting behind him, — the hardy, resolute old 
farmer. Time cannot steal such positive ^g- 



LATHEM'S WOOD. 160 



iires from me, nor the aspect of pleasant places. 
Even atmospheres stay by me, like the dense, 
smoky air of that long-past day 

We kept setting down the pail to look in, 
and the little fish swam round and round, 
turning its bright mottles to the sun. We told 
Dame Safford what Farmer Lathem had said, 
and hoped she would ofi:er to lend us her pail; 
but she did not, so we had to give her our fish 
to put in her well, and she let it down in a 
leaky old bucket tied to its pole with a rope. 
Benny and I hated to leave it, for it w^as a part 
of the brightness of our day. We threw little 
pebbles over the curb, and they w^ent down 
with a spluttering sound, slightly rippling the 
water. It was a charming old w^ell, with its 
dripping, mossy rocks, and ^ve leaned so flu- 
over its curb that the dame drew us away and 
shook us both soundly. 

Then she was sorry for wliat she had done, 
and asked us to sit down with her by the door. 
Betsy came up from the woods, and the old 
dame grew very friendl3\ After a while,— I 
do not remember what brought it about,— she 
began to tell us of little Saran (Sarah Ann was 
what she meant), who w^as burned half a dozen 
years before. "The fire," she said, " had gone 
out on the hearth, and, as w^e had no matches, 
I had to send her for coals." 

12 



170 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

" You see that blacksmith's shop at the foot 
of the hill, and the road between it and the 
wall ? 'Twas there it happened. We never knew 
just how. I saw her first, all of a blaze, and, 
before I could get to her, 'twas done ! 

" She was a sweet, pooty gal, my Saran. She 
had a ladyfied way with her, and was smart at 
her books, if it is me that says it. She was 
only ten years old when she died, and could 
read and write better than her father. He 
was awful cut up by it, and took to drink right 
off." 

Benny and I looked at the blacksmith's shop, 
standing at the foot of the hill. It was ragged 
and had passed out of use ; and the path down 
which Sarah Ann came was quite overgrown 
with blackbeny-bushes. On the brow of the 
hill, with a row of bright pans before its door, 
was the trim little cottage whence she had 
gotten her coals. 

"We had heard her story often before, and 
had read it on a stone in the old burial-ground, 
in which her grave had been the last to be dug. 
It had only touched us then like some dim 
tradition of the past ; but that day, from her 
mother's lips, it became real to us. It took 
hold of our young hearts, and we shed tears 
over little " Saran," who was burned six 3-cars 
before. 



LATHEMS WOOD. 171 

Sucldenlj the old dame said : " You are nice 
little children ; but the sun is getting low and 
you had better go home." We knew what that 
meant. Old Safford was coming, so we ran 
back into the wood, while he staggered over 
the bridge. 

It is sad, yet sweet, the way in which one 
clings to the slightest incidents of a life which 
is ended. Memory is rich in jewels coined 
by love out of trifles. For instance, I remem- 
ber that as Benny and I were running through 
the village somebody called out to us from a 
window : 

" Children, children, come here ; a lady from 
Portsmouth wants to see you!" 

Benny shot away like an arrow. I never 
knew how that lady from Portsmouth looked. 
I had a dim consciousness of somebody telling 
me to wipe my feet on the mat, and of some- 
body else asking me if I were dumb. Then 
the lady from Portsmouth laughed, patted me 
on the head, and told me I might go home. I 
did not hesitate to obey her, and from that day 
to this I have hated the lady from Portsmouth. 

My dear children, if these simple incidents, 
which swarm in my mind as I talk with you, 
seem of little worth, trust me when I tell you 
that the more of such you lay up the richer 
and happier you Avill bo. When you arc worn 



172 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

or sick or sorrowful, and when 3- ou are old, they 
will rest you ; and many pictures will jolease 
you, because the artist will only have painted 
with his brush what you have loved in Nature. 

I would go a long distance to get into a 
thread of a path which leads through a wide 
gate into a woodland. A beautiful, brown-eyed 
girl, called Marion, walks in it. She tramples 
through tall brakes, plucks flowers, talks to 
trees as if they had souls, and comes out radi- 
ant and unconscious that from her has gone 
out for me a memorial aspect into the dim old 
wood. Under an oak-tree, she fills her apron 
with acorns, which she afterwards spreads in 
the sun to dry. They are bitter, worthless 
things in reality ; but she loves them, for they 
are a part of the affluence of her field. She 
pulls apart the matted grass, and watches her 
ground-sparrows with a wide-eyed wonder. 
Another day, with no less wonder, she will 
find the nest empty and will bring it away. 
She sits upon a shaded rock-heap, or hovers 
in and about the field, drinking sweetness and 
glory into her young life, and gives for me an 
undying glow to the things about her. 

Out of all her jocund days I can only show 
you an empty bird's-nest and a few acorn-shells. 
Yet the past delight of field and woodland are 
still mine; and in memory, hand-in-hand with 



LATIJEM'S WOOD. 173 

this brown - eyed little girl, when nobody 
watches me, I go in and out the zigzag path, 
down into the wood, which is just as full as 
ever of the tracks of her little feet, and the 
sound of her child-voice, which will speak to 
me as long as life lasts. 

Somebody lighted a bonfire close by the edge 
of this wood. It w^as only the burning of dried 
stubble ; but this same brown-eyed little girl 
saw it, dropped her acorns, and cried aloud 
with delight. She prattled, with sweet speech, 
of the oxen, the upturned cart, the red-shirted 
laborers, the curling smoke, and the rich browns 
of the ploughed sod ; all framed in the crimson 
vintage of the year. The scent of dying stub- 
ble always will bring back this scene to me, 
with the eloquent speech of the dead child. 

Many more such tender memories, binding 
me to Mature, are left untold; for, lest I w^eary 
you, I stop. Meanwhile, when on your way to 
a far-famed mountain-resort, you glide, by rail, 
through a deep ravine, over one Avail of which 
you catch a glimpse of the sloping roofs of 
barns and houses, imbedded in trees and over- 
topped by a tall wdiite spire, gone in a flash ; 
and presently you pull up at a neat little sta- 
tion in the middle of a pasture, the conductor 
will call out " Whitefield I" That village is 
not Whitefield Corner, as I knew it. Its oldest 



174 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

and quaintest houses have been made over, and 
all others stare at you with an aspect of new- 
ness. The spire is a thing of late date and is 
the pride of the villagers. The old Whitefield 
was weather-worn and gray, and seemed to 
nestle in the landscape. 

Still, this one is beautiful, for its trees are 
more majestic than ever, quite overhanging 
the straight street with dense shade, and 
giving to the traveller a cool perspective down 
towards the Corner, where stand the tavern, 
the post-office, and the stores. You must stay 
in "Whitefield at least a week to have its varied 
and beautiful scenery painted on your heart. 



CHAPTER XYII. 

QUEER FOLKS. 

If you wonder, my clear children, why I 
have made so little of that coarse language, 
thought by many to he freely spoken in the 
rural districts of ]^ew England, I will say 
that very few of the farmers' families which 
I have known, have talked in that way. 

There was a farmer, living outside of White- 
field Corner, whose speech was jagged as its 
rocks. Tied to the soil, he was almost as stolid 
as the oxen he drove. He chewed tobacco in 
meeting-time, and spit into a box filled with saw- 
dust in a corner of his pew. He called hi s daugh- 
ters " gals," and his wife the " old woman." He 
was uncouth yet honest, and did no harm, ex- 
cept when he leaned upon his hoe-handle by 
the wayside and amused a traveller by " coarse 
expressions," which the latter was likely to 
repeat as specimens of Yankee dialect. Such 
will always be found, all over the country, here 
and there, on lonely farms, because there will 
always be born, in the country as well as in the 

175 



176 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

city, vulgar people who can take no polish. 
Their talk is no more a type of that of N^ew 
England farm-life than the striped trousers of 
the traditional Brother Jonathan are a type of 
its ever^^-day dress. 

The farm-talk which T have most heard was 
homely, but not coarse, — strong and full of 
figures, — figures drawn from the soil and devo- 
tion to it. Its peculiar pronunciation, so vastly 
exaggerated, was an accident which became it 
at the time, but which has largely fallen oiF in 
later generations. E'o better orators or writers 
have ever spoken or written, in this country, 
than certain ones whose wits were sharpened 
in the stimulating atmosphere of this quaint, 
figurative New England tongue. It was truly 
born of earth and toil, hence its healthy rug- 
gedness. Hence, also, that underlying imagery, 
borrowed from sun and winds, field and forest, 
from all forms and aspects of Nature. There 
was a marrow to it often, inside an outer 
crust of homeliness, a sweet-meat of sentiment. 
"When the farmer told you that his wife was a 
" good critter to work," he compared her to 
his mild-eyed oxen, which he loved, and which 
to him were the type of patience and meek- 
ness. When he said he was having " a hard 
pull" in life, his words were shaped by the 
tugging of these same oxen at his rocky farm. 



QUEER FOLKS. 177 



He scarcely opened his lips without letting fall 
some homely comparison. He " sweat like 
rain," was "hungry as a bear," "tired as a 
dog," " dry as a chip." He " patched" and 
" eked out" things, and " saved up" the 
"odds and ends" of tasks for rainy days. 
^Neighbors gave each other "starts" and 
"lifts" w^ith their work, which was always 
either " dragging," or " going easy." If a 
farmer wanted to " get on in the world," or to 
be " forehanded," he had to " put his shoulder 
to the plough," and " push like a dragon." 
They all had " set ways" and liked to "jog on" 
day by day, " evenly yoked" with their wives. 
They were " long-headed," and given to " fore- 
cast," and with " tolerable good luck" could 
" hoe their own row." It was often a "hard 
tug," but as they grew old they " slacked up," 
and they always spoke of death as the ending 
of one "journey," and the beginning of another. 
Half the talk of Farmer Lathem w\ns made 
up of old saw^s. " To get along," he said, 
" one must take time by the forelock." Early 
in tlie mornino; he mij^ht be heard shoutins; to 
Judy and Sue : " Hurry up, girls ! It's the 
early bird that catches the worm." He was as 
wcatherwise as an almanac, and was always 
telling his neighbors to make their hay while 
the sun shone. When asked how his wife was, 



178 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

he would answer : " As spry as a cricket," or 
"As chipper as a bird." If he was to be 
believed, he never had a hired man who was 
not " as slow as a snail," and who did not make 
him " as mad as a March hare." He was called 
" close" with his money, but you would not 
blame him if you knew how hard he had to 
work to get it. 

His wife, Judy, talked like him. She visited 
but little, because she was "tied, hand and 
foot," by her work. If she only " ran into a 
neighbor's" for a little, she declared that it 
" took the heart right out of a day," and, 
likely as not, made her " work drag" for a 
week. She hung her clothes to dry " in the 
ej'C of the sun," because they came in then 
" as white as the driven snow." In early spring 
she spread the same to bleach in the orchard, as 
only " May-dews and apple-blossoms" would 
" take stains out." She told time less by the 
clock than by the " lay of the sun." She had 
a notch cut in a window-sill for high noon ; 
and, after that, judged of the hours by ih.Q 
" slant of the sunbeams" on the floor. She 
liked " smart clearing-up showers"; but a slow, 
drizzling rain, in which rust and mildew " ate 
things," put her out, she said. 

There is another aspect of country - life 
which, because of its sad reality, I shall reveal 



QUEER FOLKS. 179 



to you. I tell you of it just as I Avould put 
a shadow into a picture, were I painting one, 
for I wish to be truthful. 

Two miles away from East Road was a col- 
lection of half a dozen or more hovels, lived 
in by social outcasts, breakers of the Sabbath, 
reckless of law, and unclean in their ways. 
Their yards swarmed with pigs and geese and 
dirty-faced children, while there seemed to be 
a dog and two or three cats to every hut. 
Grizzly, unkempt men lounged in their door- 
ways, and sour-faced women, in bedraggled 
dresses, stared at passers-by in a brazen way. 
The latter peddled blackberries from door to 
door at East Road in summer, and being 
what was called " light-fingered," were always 
watched. The men planted patches of ground 
■\vith corn and potatoes. In winter they shot 
ccame, and then their shed and house-walls 
were thick with stretched skins of animals, 
the odor of one kind of which was a nuisance 
to passers-by. They stole most of their wood, 
and now and then a sheep was missing from a 
pasture, the " carcass" of which honest farm- 
ers Avould hint might be found at Kit's Cor- 
ner. The men also worked out at haying and 
harvesting and did odd jobs in winter, but no 
respectable farmer's wife would give room to 
one of the women. 



180 OLD TIME CIIILDLIFE. 

The only pleasant things about the spot were 
the sunflowers and other common blossoms 
which were in front of the mean little houses. 
These throve upon unthrift ; they grew double 
out of its waste ; and the sunflowers seemed 
to turn their fat faces with a leer to the sun. 
In every other respect this hamlet was as far 
away from the decorous life of East Road as 
one pole is from the other. 

Another wicked neighborhood, made up, 
like that of Kit's Corner, of half a dozen or 
more families, was called, after its first two 
settlers. Drown City. It was not so bad as 
Kit's Corner. Its men and women got their 
living from their little farms, and were not 
thieves. They were also quite tidy in their 
ways, but they were a drinking, quarrelsome 
set. No one of them was ever seen inside 
the Whitefield Corner meeting-house. They 
worked or gossiped from door to door on 
Sunday, and their children ran at large. In 
summer the women on that day picked blue- 
berries, which they exchanged for dry-goods 
and groceries at the AYliitefield Corner stores. 

One of them, called old Betty Drown, was a 
funny-looking creature. She was so short and 
fat that she waddled when she walked. She 
always wore a white muslin cap with a frill of 
bobbinet and a broad white apron. The "White- 



QUEER FOLKS. 181 



field women said she had " an oily tongue," 
and that " butter woukln't melt in her mouth." 
She could shed tears when she chose ; so that 
when one woman wanted to call another de- 
ceitful, it was the custom to say that she could 
" cry as easy as old Betty Drown." Her ber- 
ries were thought to be uncommonly clean. 
Iler husband used to walk over to Whitefield 
Corner with her to help her carry back her 
" store-goods." He had a huge swelling in 
his neck, because of which he was such a 
fright to look at that children ran away from 
him, and it made him very angry to be stared 
at. 

The pair always took home from Whitefield 
Corner a little jug of molasses and a bottle of 
rum. They were both foolish when they were 
tipsy, but the Drown City drunkards, as a 
whole, were brawlers. The quarrels of the 
place were notorious, yet it Avas delightfully 
located on the shore of a little pond, and its 
indwell ers were by nature shrewd and hard- 
working:. What it lacked was relififion. It 
had neither meeting-house nor school-house, 
and, because its Sabbath was unkept, sin crept 
in and ate all good out of it. 

Wherever, forty years ago, a village was 
clustered around a meeting-house, and had in 
its outskirts a school-house with a beaten play- 



182 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

ground, there good citizens were sure to be 
found. I have never known statelier and 
nobler men and women than I used to know 
in Whitefield Corner and in other just such 
little villao^es. 

In a dark chamber of one of the "Whitefield 
Corner stores, where many goods were also 
kept, was a library of books, begun two-thirds 
of a century ago by Deacon Saunders' father, the 
first minister of the place, a wise man. Most of 
them were classic, bound in thick brown leather, 
and the raggedest books of the whole lot were its 
volumes of Shakespeare. This was because 
these had been so often read, and somebody had 
stitched on their disjointed covers with twine. 
It was common to find the trail of grease upon a 
page, — ^lamp-oil or the drip of a tallow candle, 
— and there were few books without dog-ears 
and finger-marks. They were kept in three 
pine cases with glass doors. I remember how 
I used, when a child, to work my way past 
crates and boxes to them, and with what awe 
I ran my finger across their dim titles. These 
best of books, as much as, if not more than, 
anything else, formed the minds and manners 
of the people of Whitefield. 

These people let Drown City alone, because, 
despite their learning and their taste, they 
were chained to a round of toil. A farmer 



QUEER FOLKS. 183 



never cut a swath in liis field that he did not 
have his eye on the edge of his scythe, lest it 
be marred by a rock. Snowbound in winter, 
in summer he had no spare time save that 
which he took from sleep. The village lawyers, 
who tried cases in so many counties, had no 
leisure. The doctor almost lived in his sulky, a 
peddler of medicine. Parson Meeker raised liis 
OAvn corn and potatoes, and could do no more 
than to hold once in a while a third service in 
Doe's school-house, which was close by Drown 
City. Mrs. Meeker, who spared no effort with 
the people of Whitefield Corner, had no 
strength left from her hardworked life to give 
to the Ishmaelites of this desert. 

Can you wonder, then, that, when there had 
been a drunken fight at Drown City, the law- 
abiding man of its adjacent village, who sat 
with a tallow candle between his eyes and his 
library-book, when told of it, simply looked 
up and said, — " They are a godless set" ? 

My dear children, the bad in country life is 
to the good as a mote to a sunbeam. I yearn 
to give you as a legacy what my pen has 
tried to portray, a few examples of its old- 
time, most worthy character. The mousing 
lawyer ; the good deacon ; the splendid doc- 
tor; the wise parson and his superior wife; 
the quaint, bright old Farmer Lathem ; — in- 



184 OLD TIME CHILD LIFE. 

deed, every man, woman, and child who have 
slight!}^ greeted you in these pages are all real 
persons, who lived their earthly lives in the 
little villages of East Eoad and "Whitefieid 
Corner. 

I am hopeless of making you know them as 
I know them, hut if they have for 3'ou that 
significance which an old portrait sometimes 
flashes down upon one from a wall, my lahor 
has not heen in vain. It is easier to snatch 
their pictures from the past, because an isola- 
tion, which can never he repeated, made their 
admirable lives spectacular. I have spoken 
with delight of their integrity and other vir- 
tues. Before I dismiss them I would like to 
impress upon you the nature of that quality in 
them called " faculty," supposed to be some- 
what peculiar to Kew England people. 

I can most easily do this by telling of a re- 
membered Whitefieid business-man. Reared 
on a rocky New England farm, one of eight 
sons, all of whom grew into a vigorous and 
creditable manhood, he had the simple boy- 
hood of a farmhouse and such early education 
as could be gotten from district-schools. A 
born poet and scholar, he matured into a per- 
son of refinement and culture. I have often 
wondered what broader tuition mic^ht have 
made of this man. lie seemed to me equal 



QUEER FOLKS. Igg 



to almost anj' destiny, but under no circum- 
stances could he have had a sweeter nature, 
better taste, finer manners, or a warmer heart! 
He was in action apt to be far beyond his 
neighbors. Wliile others waited, he wrought. 
With him rational desire meant achievement 
Moving from Whitefield Corner for wider scope 
to a larger village, he carried the materials of 
a new home with him Its pins and mortises 
and doors and windows had all been fitted in 
Whitefield, and it sprung up like a mushroom 
on the hill where he planted it. It was drawn 
by thirty-nine yokes of oxen,— seventy-eight 
ill all, six to each team, and their homely 
procession, tramping out of Whitefield Cor- 
ner before daylight, wakened all the sleepers 
in the little village. 

I have often thought of it as a picture 
showing far better than any words can do the 
invincible energy of the oldtime ]^ew Eng- 
land country workers,— those men who struc^c 
their axes into the forest-trees and their ploughs 
into the earth, saying to the one. Give of your 
strength, and to the other. Pour forth of your 
flitness. The trees and the earth obeyed them, 
because the will of the men was more potent 
than nature's hidden forces. I know about 
thatprocession,— how the teams creaked and 
groaned, how the white beams glittered in the 



13 



186 OLDTIME CHILDLIFE. 

moonlight, and the monotonous cry of the team- 
sters was heard long after it had disappeared 
over the crest of the doctor's hill. From the 
first stroke of an axe until the shaped timbers 
started on their way, there had been hard work 
in a chip-littered yard of Whitefield Corner, 
Avhere curious villagers lingered to watch the 
gradual birth of a house. There was some- 
thing poetical about this. The drying sap sent 
out sweet incense. The sound of labor was 
soft-toned and rhythmical; the warm-tinted 
chips lay lightly upon the snow; the beams 
themselves mellowed in the sun. The grow- 
ing of the thing gave an innocent diversion to 
easily-pleased loiterers. By degrees the plan 
of the man was hewn into the wood, and, 
though it littered the ground, it was in reality 
a closely fitting w^hole. Then one morning the 
skeleton was gone, dragged away in the night- 
time by the seventy-eight oxen. 

The true hewer of this house — tlae one who 
really shaped it — was the man who planned it, 
who gave brains to the hands and direction to 
edged tools, whose skill as an organizer might 
have ruled armies, — a creative man, whose tire- 
less energy was only equalled by his judgment. 

Of all the country-livers which I have pre- 
sented to you, he was, I think, the most sym- 
metrica], the best representative man. The 



QUEER FOLKS. 187 



Lord gave him length of days, and in liis de- 
clining years this successful worker, as dis- 
cerning and just as he had been strong, used 
to sit in an office of his house, reverenced 
and consulted as a wise judge. For a few 
years at the end of his beautiful life he, for 
some unseen purpose, was smitten with much 
pain. This he conquered by patience, and I 
remember with delight the last summer of 
the splendid old man, which he spent mostly 
on a veranda with his family about him, his 
neighbors doing him homage, his intellect 
bright, his aifections and sympathies alive to 
this world, his soul ripe for another. 

If, therefore, in your ^N'ew England travels 
you stumble upon a shaggy man who talks of 
a " chaw of terbacker" and almost spits in your 
face, do not mistake him for a son of one of those 
kings of the soil who ruled over the farms of 
Whitefield in my ({i\y. If, likewise, you come 
upon a cluster of homes without a meeting- 
house, where the Sabbath is profaned, and its 
people are hence coarse and ignorant, — if not 
worse, — do not confound them with such coun- 
try-people as I have known in the village of 
Whitefield Corner. 

I love that little village of Whitefield Cor- 
ner. There is a chamber-window, turned 
from its street, out of which in childhood I 



188 OLD TIME CHILDLIFE. 

used to watch the sunset-gilded crown of Red 
Mountain, and while sitting there I have 
often thought that, in the afterglow of some 
fortunate day, I would like to pass out of earth 
into heaven. Until that day comes, my dears, 
farewell ! 



THE END. 



BY THE AUTHOR OF THIS VOLUME. 

RECENTLY PUBLISHED. 

NEW ENGLAND BYGONES, 



12mo. Extra cloth. $1.25. 



" The scenes and incidents are treated with the tenderness that 
haunts all remembered childhood in a pleasant and long-forsaken 
home." — Nation. 

" Some of the pictures are worthy of an artist's pencil. It is a 
book to take up in odd moments to smile over as it brings back 
like incidents in one's own life, to weep over when remembering 
that those days are gone and never can return." — iV. Y. Church wan, 

" There is no literary pretence in it, but there is a sweet soul 
that speaks in it, and a country charm about its memories that is 
delightful." — Springfield Repuhlican. 

" Will find and keep for itself a warm corner in many a thought- 
ful reader's heart." — Philadelphia Times. 

" The very unpretentiousness and simple, honest truth makes 
the book charming." — Boston Advertiser. 

" If a native of New England has any love for his country in 
him, if lurking in some corner of his heart there is the smallest 
soft spot, it will be touched by this natural and unassuming de- 
scription of what sadly enough must be called the * Bygones.' " — 
Boston Sunday Herald. 

"A book that deserves to be placed among the classics of 
American literature." — Philadelphia Eveniny Bulletin. 



" The present unpretending offering to the memory of bygone 
days in New England bears so sincere a stamp of reality, is so 
fragrant with the natural odors of apple-blossoms and sweet fern, 
that it will win the sympathy of many readers, even among those 
who are not familiar with the scenes which it describes." — N. Y. 
Tribune. 

"A true and pure love of nature, close observation, a retentive 
memory, a highly sensitive and poetic nature, an artist's eye, and 
a practised literary habit, have all been concerned in the produc- 
tion of this charming volume. With all its feminine delicacy and 
beauty of sentiment, it has great virility also; and not a little of 
it reminds us of Emerson in his best descriptive vein. To all 
sympathetic souls we gratefully commend it," — Literary World. 

"'New England Bygones* is a boon to true sons and daughters 
of the soil. It depicts oldtime characters and sketches with con- 
summate instinct the scenes so common to our rural life; it is 
general and individual; it brings home delightful memories: it 
turns back the impetuous nature to cool, restful customs; it re- 
stores reverence for the truly meritorious parts of the past; it 
incites new love of fadeless nature; it stirs the emotional life to 
sacred issues; it is more than its author meant; it will be bought 
and read by hundreds whose daily careers will be nobler for the 
influence it exerts; kept in the household, it will be a source of 
recurrent pleasure, profit, and inspiration." — Boston Transcript. 

" An interesting and well- written work. It is from such collec- 
tions, embodying personal reminiscence, experience, and local 
custom, that the future reader must derive his knowledge of that 
most important of all histories, the history of the social life of a 
people." — Sunday -School Times. 

"It is educational in the best sense, while entertaining and re- 
freshing. It is a book of descriptions and meditations, and it 
cannot fail to stimulate a healthy love of nature and of simple 
and sterling character." — The Congregationalist. 



*-.:,* For sale by all Booksellers, or will be sent by mail, postpaid, 
upon receipt of price by 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT& CO.. Publishers. 

715 and T17 Market St., Philadelphia. 



